The ombudsman: The referee no one elected

Every game needs someone whose job is not to score.

The referee has no stake in who wins. That is the whole point of him. Take him off the court and the game does not stop. It just stops being fair. It becomes whoever is strongest, loudest or best at getting away with things while no one is looking.

Government needs the same character on the floor. Every country that has ever tried to govern itself honestly has needed one.

The word comes from Sweden. Ombudsman, from the Old Norse umboðsmaðr: representative or agent. Someone who stands in for someone else. In 1809, Sweden built an office around that word. A person independent of the king. Answerable to no one he could be investigating. His job was to make sure judges and civil servants actually followed the law, without fear or favor, and to prosecute them when they didn’t. The idea spread, because every government eventually runs into the same wall. Power investigates itself badly. Someone outside the chain of command has to be free to ask the question no one inside it wants asked.

The Philippines learned this the hard way, which is how most countries learn it. The 1973 Constitution created an office by this description, the Tanodbayan, “guardian of the people.” On paper, an ombudsman. In practice, not one. The President who appointed him could also remove him at will and could wall off any case simply by certifying it “prejudicial to national interest.” A referee who can be pulled from the game by the team he is watching is not a referee. He is a formality.

The 1987 Constitution fixed that on purpose. Article XI made the Office of the Ombudsman independent by design, not by good intention. A fixed term of seven years, no reappointment, so no one in the job ever has to please anyone to keep it. Fiscal autonomy, so the office never has to ask the government it investigates for money to keep investigating it. Removal only through impeachment, the same steep climb reserved for the president and the justices of the Supreme Court. Then Republic Act 6770, the Ombudsman Act of 1989, gave the office its teeth: the power to investigate, prosecute, suspend and dismiss any public official, of any rank, in any branch of government.

That is one of the largest grants of power a democracy can hand to a single office. It was written that large on purpose. The smaller version had already failed once.

This is what people mean when they call the ombudsman the conscience of government. Not a poetic flourish. A functional description. A conscience is the part of a person that keeps working when no one else is watching, that flags what everyone else has learned to look past. An institution needs the same faculty or it eventually rationalizes anything. The ombudsman is supposed to be the office that never gets used to corruption. Still uncomfortable about it in year 30, the way a healthy conscience never fully makes peace with what it should not tolerate.

For most Filipinos this is not a question of constitutional design. It is the only door available. A farmer whose barangay captain diverted a subsidy has no lobbyist and no lawyer on retainer. A whistleblower inside an agency has no union to protect his job. For people with no other way into accountability, the ombudsman is supposed to be free, reachable and fair no matter whose name is on the complaint. It is meant to be proof that the government polices itself even for people with no power to make it do so any other way.

This is not theoretical this year. The flood control scandal alone has grown into one of the largest corruption dockets this office has ever opened: hundreds of complaints, billions of pesos in projects that existed on paper and nowhere else, sitting lawmakers and former officials now answering plunder charges before the Sandiganbayan. Whatever anyone thinks of any single name on that list, the machinery doing the work is exactly the machinery 1987 built for this moment. An office insulated enough to point straight at the most powerful people in the country and not blink.

That is the office working as designed. It is also exactly why the design should worry us a little, not less.

An office built to be untouchable is also hard to correct if it goes wrong. That is the same insulation cutting two ways. It protects the ombudsman from a president who wants an inconvenient case buried. It also means that if the office itself is compromised, quietly, from the inside, there is no referee for the referee. The independence that lets it go after the powerful without flinching is the same independence that lets it look away from the powerful without flinching, if it chooses to. A prosecutor with this much reach can build a case with real diligence, or bury one with real efficiency, and from the outside those can look identical for a long time. Few institutions in this country can do as much good quietly, or as much damage quietly, as this one.

That is not an argument for a weaker ombudsman. Weaker means ordinary complaints go nowhere and the powerful go untouched, which is exactly what the 1973 version already showed us. It is an argument for taking the office as seriously as its design demands, and remembering that independent was never meant to mean unwatched. Public attention is still the only check that runs every day, in the long stretch between one impeachment proceeding and the next.

A country’s hope was never supposed to depend on whoever happens to be sitting in that office this year. It depends on whether the office itself still holds after they leave it. Few institutions in this country were built more deliberately to survive that test than this one. But rules on paper do not survive anything by themselves. What survives is whether someone inside is still willing to use them.

That is the job, stripped down. Someone has to be willing to call the foul on the biggest player on the floor, in front of everyone, before checking whether it is safe to do so. Not because it is easy. Because no one else can.

No one elected the referee. No one can fire him either. That was never the flaw. That was the design.

*      *      *

Luigi Bonoan is the Assistant Ombudsman and a faculty lecturer at De La Salle University