Massive corruption amidst ‘open government’

At the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Global Summit on Oct. 9, the Philippine government, represented by Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman, accepted an award “for its commitment to improve data availability, interoperability, and public participation in procurement” in the Asia and Pacific Region. The Philippines was also the winner in the OGP’s anti-corruption category.

This is the biggest irony, however — while the Marcos administration accepted these awards, it is also receiving massive backlash over the largest corruption scandal in Philippine history.

The OGP was launched in 2011 with the Philippines as one of eight government members of the steering committee. Nearly 15 years later, the Philippines has still failed to adequately meet two of four OGP “Core Eligibility Criteria” for membership — “Asset Disclosure” and “Access to Information.” A third eligibility criteria — “Fiscal Transparency” — has turned into a myth, too, given recent exposés on unprogrammed funds and congressional insertions used for corruption in flood control projects and perhaps other expenditure items. It has failed to inspire strong traction on the fourth eligibility criteria of “Citizen Engagement.”

On Sept. 16, 2011, before the OGP launch in New York, the Right to Know, Right Now! (R2KRN) Coalition had called out the Philippine government in a statement titled “Double Talk on FOI: Gov’t long on promises, short on political will.” In it, the R2KRN pointed out the striking irony of the Philippines committing to the OGP while refusing to pass a Freedom of Information (FOI) law. Years later in 2020, the Office of the Ombudsman put the asset records of senior public officials under lock and key. The irony and double talk on OGP linger to this day in the Philippines.

The OGP had the effect, perhaps unintended, of posing new challenges to the homegrown FOI movement. It disproportionately promoted Western-driven frameworks of open budget and open data. International support and technical assistance, at least in the Philippine case, shifted strongly toward fiscal openness and data platforms and ignored nationally grounded right-to-information advocacy and practice. It may well be the shared experience of other national FOI movements.

OGP’s stress on “open data” and “national action plans,” which are hardly vetted among broad numbers of citizens, are useful only to a limited extent. They have proffered them as the dominant frame for “openness,” or the visible and supposedly measurable proof of reform.

The downside is that the OGP has de-emphasized the hard political work of guaranteeing access to information by law and citizen practice. Supposedly strong performance on disclosure and budget scorecards has come with weak gains on legal rights and participatory practice. The outcome, therefore, has been uneven — governments claim star-performance reforms by OGP’s limited metrics, even as citizens have yet to see their real and meaningful impact, by the OGP’s “Grand Values” notably: Improving Public Services, Increasing Public Integrity, More Effectively Managing Public Resources, Creating Safer Communities; and Increasing Corporate Accountability.

Today, the Philippines ranks high in the Open Budget Survey on Oversight and Transparency, but dismally low on Public Participation. This confirms what we see on the ground: budgets may be disclosed, but governance is not truly open. Citizens still lack a fully operational legal guarantee of their right to information, and participation remains tokenistic.

From these, what emerges is a budget cycle with strong built-in safeguards, by law, but distorted and porous and systemically gamed and captured by crooks, in practice:

• Preparation and authorization: congressional “insertions” and ballooning unprogrammed appropriations redirected funds away from public priorities. Even balances of government corporations like the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. or PhilHealth were swept away from their intended purposes, and likely diverted towards pork barrel allocations.

• Execution: Procurement safeguards have collapsed into collusion. “In-house” contracting by Department of Public Works and Highways insiders, license-lending for royalty fees, and simulated bidding turned competition rules into farce.

• Accountability: Oversight bodies have been compromised. Portions of project funds were allegedly set aside for auditors, and even a Commissioner of the Commission on Audit has been implicated in soliciting projects.

In short, every safeguard of the budget cycle has been bent by the very actors entrusted to enforce them. The checks and balances that have been touted by the OGP and the Department of Budget and Management — as the Philippines’ OGP steering committee chair — have become opportunities for plunder. This bantay-salakay dynamic, where watchmen turn raiders, has hollowed out the system.

Just as important, it is most concerning that amid this festering discourse on corruption, OGP Philippines has been silent, unable or unwilling to collectively confront the incessant public rebuke of how its member agencies from government may have had a role in the plunder.

The consequences are concrete: Ghost projects, substandard infrastructure projects, and wasted funds that directly endanger the safety and lives of citizens.

This is a danger we see for OGP as well: It might just serve governments as a convenient shield to flaunt that they are scoring quite well internationally, even while betraying true openness and accountability at home. We earnestly hope that this will not be the tragedy of OGP: Heroes elsewhere, heels in their home territory.

We share these reflections not to diminish the OGP’s value, but to exhort it to reflect once again its founding principles and promises.

Open government must begin with the people’s right to know. Open budgets and open data are valuable tools, but they cannot substitute for legally guaranteed and operational access to information and genuine citizen power in decision-making.

OGP’s value will be greatest when it deepens the power of citizens to hold institutions to account, not when it serves as an international certificate that paper and digital records exist while rights and participation remain weak.

Jenina Joy Chavez, Nepomuceno Malaluan, And Malou Mangahas are co-convenors of the Right to Know, Right Now! (R2KRN) Coalition.