Duterte’s Bumbling Corruption

Among Filipinos working in the Middle East, the talk inevitably turns to home. In encounters in hallways, on buses, while getting a haircut, we chat about our shared experiences as expats with deep connections to our home.

Millions of Filipinos across the region are respected for their professionalism and high- quality work, while in the Philippines opportunities are scarce and wages low. Yet systemic corruption and patronage politics in our resource-rich country provide well for our rulers and those who support them.

Indeed, Philippine democracy — with its reign of celebrity, dynasties and nepotism — is the opposite of a meritocracy. Incompetence is forgiven in those who show fidelity to the rulers, while fame and its pursuit are spun as competence, which has always served the powerful well. Despite President Rodrigo Duterte’s electoral promises, little has changed where it matters most: our political culture.

One recent blunder here in the Middle East sums up well the transactional relationship between Filipino politicians and those who work for them.

In April, the Kuwaiti government severed diplomatic ties with the Philippines after Filipino officials staged a covert, unilateral operation there to extricate workers whom they said had been abused by their employers. After the Duterte administration gleefully turned it into a publicity stunt, the Kuwaitis accused the Philippines of extrajudicial action and a violation of sovereignty, expelling our ambassador and arresting members of the embassy staff.

Some 260,000 Filipinos were left in Kuwait without representation from their country. The seriousness of this cannot be overstated, given the urgent problem of migrant worker abuse in the Middle East.

Despite the government’s showboating, none of the Filipino officials involved has been held responsible.

One was Mocha Uson, a blogger who parlayed her fame as a sexy dancer into a position overseeing the president’s social media. She was in Kuwait during the operation and publicized it to her sizable online following, posting the video that eventually outraged the Kuwaiti government.

Neither she nor Alan Peter Cayetano, the Philippine foreign secretary, appeared to pay any price for the blunder. In fact, the administration defended Mr. Cayetano, whose fidelity to Mr. Duterte, his running mate in the 2016 election, seems to make up for his lack of diplomatic experience. He has been tasked with defending the president in public, denying human-rights-abuse allegations in their drug war that has claimed the lives of thousands of untried suspects.

Such transactional relationships are par for the course in our ossified political culture, where accountability is usually selective and always part of a strategy.

Despite praise from Mr. Duterte’s supporters for his firing of dozens of public officials — for violations including incompetence, corruption and drug-smuggling — only two of those fired have been charged with crimes. And that the president fires his allies by no means negates the fact that, in most cases, it was he who hired them.

In fact, several have been reappointed to other, often higher, positions, despite Mr. Duterte’s vow to never tolerate even a “whiff” of corruption. Among those was the customs chief, who was tied to the smuggling of more than a ton of crystal meth in an operation that allegedly involved the president’s son and son-in-law.

Reward is the flip side of accountability. Many of Mr. Duterte’s political appointees are supporters who appear to have received payment for deeds laid at the president’s feet.

Members of the Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption, for example, received high-level appointments following their actions against opposition figures, like Senator Leila de Lima, who has been in jail for more than a year on dubious testimony from convicted drug lords. Their efforts also helped lead to the ouster of the Supreme Court chief justice, who infuriated the administration with her independence.

By empowering surrogates, Mr. Duterte empowers himself, using the increasingly complicit institutions of democracy, giving his authoritarian aspirations a veneer of legitimacy.

His allies already control Congress, with a supermajority handed to him after his presidential win when representatives switched sides en masse to join his party. And elections for thousands of local positions across the country in May had been postponed for nearly two years while the administration sought room to maneuver, alleging the need to purge candidates they claimed were financed by drugs.

While the agility of a competent, benevolent dictatorship may appeal to many Filipinos, especially those millions who have lived in Singapore and the Middle East, the Duterte regime has proved to be neither competent nor benevolent. His ostentatious style has been emulated by his underlings, in a bumbling way. Some recent opinion polls show drops in approval for his government.

But to the mercenary it hardly matters. Public-relations efforts from his deputies lead to notoriety, to political positions, to a lifetime of comfort and control as long as one’s patrons are ensconced in office. What, then, can we citizens do? Unless we resist such efforts by demanding accountability from all our public servants, we’ll continue to be ruled by those who trade service for servility and dangle rights in exchange for obeisance.

The president, for all his posturing as a man of humble beginnings, and his promises of change, is a governor’s son and the patriarch of a dynasty that retains power through favors and administers justice arbitrarily. Mr. Duterte may sometimes seem atypical among Filipino rulers, but in this respect, he is typical.

No wonder so many Filipinos continue to seek lives abroad with security and agency.

The other day, here in Abu Dhabi, the Filipino man cutting my hair told me about the politics in his hometown. Everyone knows the politicians are corrupt, he explained, but it’s excused because at least they provide for the community.

“They always come to our fiestas,” he said, with a shrug. “And they give us money so that we can have them.”