In Indonesia, all 580 members of its House of Representatives received a monthly housing allowance of about US$3,000 per month in addition to their salaries. In a country with a GDP per capita of approximately US$4,900, such allowance was equal to almost 10 times the minimum wage of its average workers.
In Nepal, the government banned 26 social media sites and messaging apps, a move widely seen as an attempt to restrict freedom of expression and censor online content critical of the ruling administration’s irregularities and misuse of public funds.
Public fury is growing over such shameless displays of privilege and wealth.
In the Philippines, monsoon rains and cyclones exposed supposed flood control projects across the country in recent months. Local politicians, government agencies, and construction companies colluded with each other to corner billions of pesos for overpriced, substandard, or “ghost” projects.
Corruption, defined as the use of public office for private gain, has become blatant and systemic, as the examples in these three countries illustrate. According to the 2024 Corruption Perception Index of Transparency International, Indonesia ranked 99, Nepal placed 108, while the Philippines was rated 114 out of 180 countries surveyed – the lower the rank, the higher corruption is perceived as prevalent. Corruption has become so embedded in these countries’ politics and governance that bribery, extortion, fraud, embezzlement, nepotism, cronyism, and influence peddling has become a way of life.
These developing countries share similar political and economic context that reinforces systemic corruption. They have highly regulated economies that give rise to monopolies. Political competition and civil liberties are often restricted. National laws are often manipulated, while legal institutions charged with enforcing them are largely ineffective. Thus, government officials succumb to corruption when “the benefits are large, the chances of getting caught are small, and penalties when caught are light”.
Countries plagued by systemic corruption typically possess a wide disparity in income inequality, with wealth concentrated among the privileged few while poverty is the reality for the majority. The disparity is striking as the rich, particularly their offspring, flaunt conspicuous wealth on social media for the millions of poor to see. They are widely scorned as “Nepo babies” or “Nepo kids”. Short for nepotism, the term refers to the children who become rich, famous, or successful because of their parent’s status. The Nepo babies in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Philippines, have become the targets of public indignation for their luxury goods and lavish lifestyles perceived to be funded by taxpayers’ money their parents have stolen.
Public fury is growing over such shameless displays of privilege and wealth, amid widespread poverty, joblessness, cost of living pressures, poor healthcare or housing shortages.
In Indonesia, people set fire to government buildings, damaged public facilities, and looted private properties. President Prabowo Subianto eventually slashed the parliament members’ housing allowances and suspended overseas trips in response to mounting public anger.
In Nepal, protesters burned government buildings, some ransacked the private residences of Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and other politicians, while others chased down and assaulted government officials. The Nepalese government eventually lifted its sweeping ban on social media. Yet violent protests continued, due to long-held grievances against government corruption resulting in Oli’s resignation.
In the Philippines, unlike Indonesia and Nepal, street rallies were smaller and relatively peaceful, with public outrage largely vented out online. Interestingly, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has given support to a scheduled nationwide protest on 21 September, the same date his father declared martial law in 1972: “If I wasn’t president, I might be out in the streets with them”. Marcos has since created an independent body that would investigate corruption involving government officials, not only in flood control projects, but also other public works nationwide. With the president’s support and the country’s history of non-violent people power revolutions, Filipinos are expected to go out to the streets, not only to express outrage, but to peacefully demand justice and accountability.
As these countries confront systemic corruption, institutional reforms are necessary guarded by citizen activism. The reality however is that each reform can be manipulated or outpaced by the corrupt, who adapt faster than institutions can respond. Yet the incidences in these countries reveal that public vigilance and clamour for accountability prove to be effective, not by solving corruption overnight, but by slowly exposing its shameless systemic pattern to steal from the nation.
