The Trillion Peso March is necessary. And I strongly support this movement. Yet part of me harbors doubt—might this be another exercise in futility? Consider the absurdity: P1.9 trillion spent on flood control over fifteen years, billions lost to corruption, while Filipinos drown during storms. As a business school professor, I'm supposed to peddle optimism. As a Filipino watching this unfold, the pull toward apathy grows stronger each monsoon season.

What's the point of another march when corruption has become the Philippines' most successful product?

Because that's exactly what corruption is—a product with seemingly unbeatable market fit. It offers the fastest route to wealth and power. Efficient, predictable, normalized across society. "Garapalan na," we say with practiced resignation. We're literally drowning while the funds meant to prevent drowning disappear into familiar pockets. The metaphor is so obvious it hurts.

Is there a way to fight corruption directly while also building something better? (And, yes, this is the optimist in me refusing to give way to apathy.)

Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation suggests something counterintuitive: you don't beat incumbents by attacking them directly. You build something better that serves the people they ignore. The disruptor starts small, looks inferior at first, then improves until the incumbent becomes irrelevant. Kodak didn't lose to better film—it lost to phones that made film unnecessary.

So, let's reframe corruption as our incumbent product. It serves well-connected elites beautifully. Immediate rewards, personalized service, centuries of market dominance. But like all incumbents, it has fatal weaknesses: it requires secrecy, excludes most people, and builds relationships on fear rather than trust. Every bribe creates two prisoners—the giver and the taker—locked in mutual blackmail.

The disruptor's question isn't "How do we stop corruption?" It's "What could make corruption obsolete?"

Business schools could become the disruption engines. Not through another ethics course or compliance seminar, but by convening something more ambitious. Imagine academic institutions using their unique position—trusted by government, needed by business, allied with civil society—to build transparency infrastructure that simply works better than corruption.

Here's what this might look like on the ground: Students partner with local government units for procurement monitoring as their capstone projects. Not make-work academic exercises, but real analysis with real consequences. They track infrastructure projects from tender to completion, creating public dashboards that show costs, timelines, and quality outcomes. Simple at first—maybe just one barangay project—then expanding as the model proves itself.

The genius is in the value exchange. LGUs get free analytical capacity and academic credibility. Businesses joining the partnership access talent pipelines—imagine access to the best graduates because you're verified to be corruption-free. Civil society gains institutional backing for advocacy. Students get education that matters while performing genuine public service.

This isn't theoretical. We can learn from other countries: Ukraine built ProZorro during wartime, saving $6 billion through transparent e-procurement that citizens monitor daily. Estonia turned radical transparency into competitive advantage—you can start a company in 18 minutes, and citizens see exactly who accesses their data. They were better products that made corruption look slow and expensive by comparison.

But technology alone won't work here. The Philippines runs on different operating system—one built on kapwa and the constant negotiation between authentic connection and transactional survival.

Corruption doesn't just steal money; it murders kapwa, our fundamental sense of shared identity. Every bribe transforms a relationship meant for mutual care into pure transaction. We become actors in an elaborate false performance of pakikipagkapwa that drains everyone involved. The corrupt official who demands bribes from their own kababayan has already severed themselves from the community, no matter how many basketball courts they donate with stolen funds.

Real kaginhawaan—that good life we claim to pursue—has nothing to do with individual luxury built on communal suffering. The businessman who wins contracts through bribes might buy a mansion, but can he breathe easy knowing his fortune rests on his kapwa's poverty?

The transparency systems I'm describing restore something deeper than clean governance. They rebuild the possibility of authentic bayanihan, except instead of moving bamboo houses, we're moving institutions. When students monitor projects, businesses provide expertise, government opens data, and communities verify results, we're creating modern collective action that honors rather than exploits our interconnection.

The legacy question cuts through rationalization: Paano tayo maaalala? How will our children remember us? For the wealth we extracted or the systems we built that allowed everyone to prosper? Every parent who pays a bribe "for their family's future" might pause to consider what future they're creating—one where their children inherit not just money but shame, not just comfort but complicity.

The Trillion Peso March matters because it breaks the stupor, even briefly. But after we march, we need to build. Not just another oversight body or anti-corruption task force, but the infrastructure of disruption—starting in classrooms, spreading through networks, sustained by values we claim but rarely practice.

We can keep drowning in corruption while building imaginary flood controls. Or we can recognize that the greater flood we're really drowning in is systemic theft, and the real infrastructure we need isn't just concrete but transparency that makes corruption obsolete

Let us dare lift our fellow Filipinos from drowning in the floods of corruption and breathe life into the present and future generations!