Corruption kills

We have a Cebuano proverb that says, “Wala’y aso nga makumkom” (Nothing hidden stays hidden). That adage comes to mind after Typhoon Tino last week exposed what had long been a collective moral blindness: a Cebu that pinched its rivers with flood-control infrastructure --forcing waterways to adjust to human settlements instead of the other way around-- stripped its mountains in the name of development, and treated drainage as an afterthought in both vertical and horizontal projects.

But I found a sharper, more fitting truism, this time written as a mural painted across a long row of metal roll-up doors on an old concrete building at the corner of N. Bacalso and V. Rama Avenue in Cebu City. The message, written in large bubble letters with thick white outlines, declares: “KORAPSYON mo’y TINUOD nga KALAMIDAD!!!”

It appears in a photo posted by 90.7 Brigada News on social media on November 7, translated as “Corruption is the real calamity.” The huge hand-painted line on a public wall is, strictly speaking, vandalism, and therefore against the rules, assuming the building owner did not consent to it. But this is one of those moments when you wish the city’s walls would talk back like this (I learned from a friend on social media that the graffiti has recently been painted over in black).

People are tired of “praise releases” and glossy social media posts. These days the truth seeps through curated photos and PR, you can even smell it. I know someone who traveled to the mid-north who said the air carried a faint stench of decomposing organic matter, though she didn’t specify exactly where. One would hope the smell came only from dead animals, but with the number of still-missing persons, it could very well come from decomposing bodies.

Yet barely has the mud dried up and the stench of decay dissipated, we are already treated to another kind of stench: that of PR stunts and statements from entrenched politicians quick to distance themselves from accountability for the tragedy.

Another truism, this time only two words, is: “Corruption kills.” And science backs this up. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), hardly known for activist rhetoric, published a 2023 working paper by Cevik and Jalles that states: “The devastating impact of corruption on loss of human lives caused by natural disasters is significantly greater in developing countries, which are even more vulnerable to nonlinear effects of corruption.”

After studying 344 earthquakes from 1975–2003, researchers likewise found a clear pattern: the more public-sector corruption, the more people die in major earthquakes (Escaleras, Anbarci, & Register, 2007). Professor Matthew E. Kahn in his 2003 study “The Death Toll From Natural Disasters: The Role of Income, Geography, and Institutions” concludes: “Institutions are the most important determinant of deaths from disasters.” Democracies and higher-quality institutions suffer fewer deaths and are more important than geography in insulating nations from such shocks.

To be clear, in the words of Professor David E. Alexander, writing for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science (2017), “not all corruption is illegal, and not all of that which is against the law is vigorously pursued by law enforcement.” Whether the legal or illegal kind, corruption takes resources meant for everyone and diverts them to a few, harming the whole community.

Concludes Alexander: “As corruption is commonly hidden carefully beneath a veneer of legality or respectability, there are certain key moments when it is revealed. These may occur at the end of a long, painstaking investigation, but they are just as likely to happen when a disaster strikes and the consequences of corruption are suddenly, panoramically revealed.”