The rigged game

We love talking about corruption as if it were a sudden moral virus — a few bad apples skimming off flood control budgets or customs gates. It isn’t. It’s the operating system.

When political economist Calixto “Toti” Chikiamco stood before the 25th Jaime V. Ongpin Annual Memorial Lecture at Ateneo de Manila University, he didn’t just diagnose another scandal; he autopsied eighty years of “path dependence”. We have built an economy where whispering to the right committee chair pays better than building a better factory.

Trace the rot back to what Chikiamco calls our “original sin” — the 1946 Bell Trade Act, which traded away monetary sovereignty for postwar parity rights, birthing a regime of import controls and foreign exchange rationing. Politicians quickly realized that licenses and quotas were gold mines. Ferdinand Marcos Sr.perfected that crony playbook with state loans and monopolies, and when we wrote the 1987 Constitution to stop another dictatorship, we accidentally locked the oligarchy inside the fortress.

For nearly forty years, lawmakers and regulators have wrapped themselves in the flag of “Filipino-first” monopolies, hiding behind constitutional nationalism to shield entrenched conglomerates from foreign and domestic competition. Regulatory agencies meant to protect consumers became gatekeepers of privilege.Look at what that protectionism bought ordinary Filipinos. Manufacturing has withered from 22% to 16% of gross domestic product. According to the 2026 OECD Economic Survey of the Philippines, services now swallow 63% of our GDP while goods exports sit at a pathetic 12% — compared with 85% in Vietnam. Two-thirds of Filipino workers remain trapped in informal jobs with thin social protection, while even formal earners in Metro Manila scrape by on a daily minimum wage of PHP 718.00 to PHP 755.00, paying some of the region’s highest electricity and telecom bills because vertically integrated conglomerates own the grid and the wires.

In the countryside, we confused parceling out tiny, unviable plots of land with social justice. Outdated land retention limits starved farms of scale and agribusiness capital, leaving rural families poor while politically connected import cartels clean up.

Fixing this requires more than a chainsaw. Tearing down walls without building institutions is just another way to get robbed. Ateneo political scientist Christopher Nex Bengson Beñas rightly warns against foreign land dispossession if we blindly liberalize property rules before fixing the state.

“The dispossession of our people, especially with the entry of capital to buy our land, is real. Sequence matters.”

We need a sequenced reform roadmap over blanket deregulation. First, build what Beñas calls “embedded autonomy” — a merit-based, professional bureaucracy insulated from oligarchic capture. Push the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas out of its comfort zone to adopt a developmental mandate with a competitive exchange rate, while trade negotiators aggressively open export markets. Pivot our social justice playbook from land parceling to human capital, pouring state resources into serious technical education — from agribusiness to coding and machine learning — alongside higher land retention limits so farms can actually scale. And if Congress wants to prove it isn’t for sale, it must enact state financing for political parties to sever the cord between campaign donors and post-election regulatory favors.

Jaime V. Ongpin spent his life fighting Marcos-era cronyism so Filipinos could compete on merit. Forty years after EDSA, the surname on the palace door changes, the campaign jingles get louder, and the same families still write the rules.