Vice President Sara Duterte exhorted businessmen to use technology as a weapon against corruption and ensure better governance.
The vice-president stressed this in a keynote speech at the opening Monday, Oct. 20, of the 51st Philippine Business Conference (PBC) & Expo, the country’ largest annual business conference, at SMX Convention Center, with the theme “The Future is Now: Unleashing the Power of Digital Transformation.”
“Let us use technology and digital transformation as weapons to close the door where corruption once thrived, unchecked and unpunished,” Duterte said.
Duterte said that if technology is a blessing to modern society, it should be used to protect the people’s rights and welfare.
These rights, she said, include the right to have better governance, the right to have better opportunities in the country and the strong political to put leaders in check when they have “unforgivably gone beyond the authority that the people have vested in them.”
She explained that technology can be weaponized against corruption because as processes are automated, digitized, it will make data and all government transactions transparent. With that, there will be “no room for scrupulous backdoor transactions.”
With technology, she said, “We take away the power of corrupt leaders to manipulate public funds and capitalize on people’s money for their personal interests, greed, and political ambition.”
Technology, she said, will be a “powerful tool to impose checks and balances, monitor paper trails, eliminate arbitrary and politically motivated decision-making, and prevent unconstitutional budget insertions to curry political favor at the expense of the people’s money. “
Likewise, she said that digital transformation also means investing in people to develop capacities to strategically take advantage of future opportunities to create a strong, more resilient, and more competitive nation.
“The advancement of technology is rapidly affecting our operational processes and impacting our decision-making in business, education, research and innovation, health, public administration, food production, manufacturing, aviation, maritime navigation, and aerospace engineering,” she added.
