Why we need a corruption museum

Filipinos are a passionate people, but too often our passion burns like ningas cogon—a sudden blaze that quickly dies out. Nothing shows this more starkly than our attitude toward corruption. A scandal breaks. We rage, we demand resignations, we threaten impeachments. Then, as soon as the next crisis distracts us, the fire goes cold. Corruption goes back underground, mutating, burrowing deeper into our systems. We move on, but the rot stays.

The truth is, corruption in the Philippines is not episodic. It is systemic. As Robert Klitgaard taught us long ago, corruption is not about wicked individuals alone—it is about monopoly plus discretion minus accountability. Our mistake has been to treat each scandal as a soap opera: villains, heroes, a Senate hearing, a sound bite. What we lack is memory. What we lack is continuity.

Consider Singapore. The city-state that now ranks among the least corrupt in the world runs a Corruption and Integrity Exhibition, a permanent showcase of how it nearly lost the fight against graft in its early years. Schoolchildren are brought there regularly. They see case files, names, and consequences. It is a blunt reminder that corruption is not an abstraction—it is theft from every citizen.

Imagine a Philippine Corruption Museum. Not to sensationalize shame, but to archive our national pain. One hall could display the grand scandals of each era: the Marcos billions recovered by the Presidential Commission on Good Government, the fertilizer scam, “Hello Garci,” the pork barrel plunder, the flood-control anomalies we are uncovering now. Each exhibit would list names, dates, amounts, and modus operandi. Another hall could honor the heroes: Pura Sumangil and her infra-monitoring citizens in Abra; Jun Lozada, who bared the NBN-ZTE scam; Heidi Mendoza, who exposed the AFP “pabaon” practice; BenHur Luy, who uncorked the Napoles pork barrel scam; and the journalists and auditors who uncovered pillage and plunder and the prosecutors and whistleblowers who risked their lives. Another hall could feature systems, innovations, and strategies on how corruption has been defeated across countries.

A museum would be more than history. It would be pedagogy. It would show young Filipinos what corruption really means: the use of public office for private gain, whether in Malacañang or a barangay hall, whether in government or corporate boardrooms. It would show how corruption explains why classrooms lack chairs, why hospitals lack beds, why rivers keep flooding despite trillions spent on dikes and dredging. Without such memory, we are condemned to keep reliving the same scandals, the same outrage, the same fatigue.

Memory must be collective, not just institutional. Twenty years ago, we had the Transparency and Accountability Network (TAN), a broad coalition of NGOs, people’s organizations, and faith groups that pressed the government to fight graft in partnership with citizens. They monitored budgets, joined procurement boards, and demanded lifestyle checks. Their energy helped power reforms like the Integrity Development Review and citizen audits.

But TAN, like many reformist coalitions, withered. Donor support waned. Media attention shifted. Government enthusiasm evaporated. Yet the need for such a coalition is even greater today. No single agency—not the Ombudsman, not the Commission on Audit, not even the President—can stamp out corruption on its own. Civil society has to be revived, organized, and resourced to serve as watchdog, mobilizer, and memory-keeper.

Former Department of Public Works and Highways secretary Rogelio Singson has laid out in painful detail how corruption seeps through every crevice of public works—from subcontracting cartels to overdesigned flood projects. Sen. Panfilo Lacson has broken down the “pie-sharing” formula of kickbacks, where up to 60 percent of project budgets are siphoned before a single bag of cement is poured. These are not accidents of personality. They are the predictable results of systems that reward discretion, secrecy, and greed.

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This is why relying on outrage alone is folly. Outrage is short-lived. Systems endure. Unless we build systems of accountability that last longer than political terms and news cycles, our ningas cogon will never burn into sustained fire.

A museum of corruption would give us one permanent reminder. Reviving coalitions like TAN would give us another. Embedding anti-corruption into school curricula would etch the lessons deeper still. Above all, we need institutions that do not depend on who sits in Malacañang or who chairs a congressional committee. We need memory that outlives politics.

It is time to flip the script. To turn the anti-corruption fight into a generational mission. But first, we must learn to remember and to institutionalize memory.