*Dr. Rodolfo John Ortiz Teope, PhD, EdD, DM
There are nights when I dream of a country that wakes up clean—not only its streets, but its conscience. I see children running across fields that were once flooded by money stolen under the guise of public works, mothers who no longer count the cost of school supplies against rice for the week, and barangays that repair bridges because there is money left for building, not for stealing. Then I wake up, and the dream is heavy with the smell of damp paper contracts and the distant laughter of men who have learned how to live like kings on a pauper’s loot. That laughter is the sound of kleptocracy; it is the sound I cannot bear.
We talk about restructuring, about decentralizing, about creating new agencies or abolishing those who have failed. We debate names and organizational charts as if rot in the beams can be fixed by moving the furniture. But I have learned that a name change does not baptize a sinner. You can carve up the institution into a hundred smaller offices, and the greed will flow into them like oil into different jars. The landscape will look different, but the stain will remain. The real question is not who holds the shovel; it is who has learned to sell the soil.
Corruption in our nation is intimate and ordinary. It is the small, almost respectful bribe for a permit; the grand, audacious diversion of billions for a project that exists only on paper; the casual wink that protects a contractor who names no real suppliers. It is a grammar we have all been taught—the polite way to ask for a favor, the quiet assurance that laws are negotiable if you have the right friends and the right notes inside an envelope. This grammar has become a language of survival for some, a system of privileges for others, and a slow death for the rest of us.
I do not write my words in rage alone. I write it in sorrow for my countrymen who wake up each morning to the same injustices that drown their opportunities. I write it because I have seen how a thief graduates from taking petty sums to orchestrating empires of theft. Greed, once tasted, becomes a hunger that eats the very anchors of decency. It buys influence, it recruits silence, and it fashions rules that bend like reeds in a storm. And when the storm comes—the floods, the collapsed bridges, the schools that cannot open—the people who suffer were never the architects of that greed. They were its casualties.
What would it mean, then, to “create fear in the hearts of the corrupt”? To some, the phrase will sound cruel, vengeful, and even impossible. To me, it should be read as a plea for the restoration of moral consequence. Fear of the law, of public disgrace, of the certainty that a life built on stolen funds will unravel—that is what can deter those who measure every act only by its gain. Not fear for fear’s sake, but fear grounded in justice: swift, impartial, and unavoidable.
Imagine if a few of the great looters were made to answer in a court that does not bow. Imagine the headlines not as predictable reruns but as sudden shocks: names once untouchable reduced to testimonies, opinions reversed, luxury seized and returned to the people. Imagine children learning in classrooms rebuilt with recovered funds and mothers who can buy medicine without debt. That fear would be the seed of a new habit—not a habit of hiding, but a habit of honesty. When the powerful see consequences that are not negotiable, their spreadsheets of greed shrink. Their networks falter. The culture that tolerates petty exemptions and grand heists would learn to flinch.
This message is not a call to cruelty. It is a call to justice with courage. We demand the toughening of public protection systems until thieves have no safe harbor left. Strengthen oversight, yes, but more than that: make accountability unavoidable. Invest in forensic audit teams that relentlessly pursue financial gains. Make prosecution predictable and convictions timely. Remove the protective cloth of political patronage that so often drapes the guilty. And let the moral language change: let honesty be praised not as an exception but as the standard, and let corruption be named for what it always is—theft, betrayal, and violence against the common good.
Kleptocracy is cunning; it prefers to be polite. It frames theft as efficiency, bribery as facilitation, and looting as entrepreneurship. We must refuse those euphemisms. We must become loud and clamorous about what was taken and by whom, not to satisfy vengeance but to restore what was stolen from a thousand nameless lives. That restoration is not merely financial; it is moral repair. It is the slow work of restoring trust, of teaching the next generation that public service is not a stepping stone to private fortune but a sacred duty.
When people ask if I want blood for justice, I say no. What I want is consequence. I want the corrupt to feel the chill of accountability so that they will choose a different path. I want a system that makes stealing riskier than serving. If fear means a future in which children’s laughter is the loudest sound after a storm, then let that fear be the instrument of our rebirth.
I write this because I love a country that deserves better than quiet theft. I write because I have seen too many lives ruined by the polite crimes of men who thought they were above consequence. The end of kleptocracy will not come with new names on organizational charts. It will come from the day when corruption is met with inevitability—when justice is no longer optional and honesty is no longer rare. Create fear in the hearts of the corrupt, no more, no less. That is how we begin to mend a flooded nation.
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