We have become a battered and traumatized people.
Notice how frantic we become when a storm threatens. Every precaution is taken. Work and school are suspended. We buckle down and expect the worst.
We are among the most disaster-prone countries in the world. But until lately, we have confronted calamity with a certain elan. We cultivated a certain confidence that we would always pull together and surmount the challenges we are fated to endure.
Some of that elan has dissipated. We have lost confidence in our public infrastructure. We fear that, because of corruption, our bridges would fall, our dams would break and our hospitals would collapse.
When a major quake struck northern Cebu a few days ago, patients were evacuated from the only hospital in Bogo City. People were reluctant to return to the facility even after engineers declared the hospital safe. They did not trust government engineers.
For days, people subsisted under plastic trash bags to keep out the rain, refusing the safety of evacuation centers. There is such distrust for edifices built under government contracts.
At the slightest rainfall, our streets flood. There is enough evidence that the ill-conceived flood control projects did not just fail to solve the problem. They aggravated the flooding. Many of these projects after all were intended simply to facilitate looting.
We have been betrayed by the political class. This fact taxes our pride in our nationhood.
Our government has failed us on every front. Our educational system was allowed to rot, leaving the next generation ill-equipped to thrive in the world ahead. Our public health system is barely there. Our agriculture is unable to feed our people. Our economy is unable to keep our people meaningfully employed.
The calamities that hit us are worsened by failure in governance. We wasted trillions in useless projects by a government that seeks to win acceptability through political patronage.
We cannot stop storms and earthquakes. But adept governance should have enabled us to mitigate their effects. Denied adept governance, robbed by those who are supposed to lead us, we have become more vulnerable as a community.
I was moved by a post circulating widely in social media. It read: How can we love our country if we cannot trust our government?
Dissembling
Indeed, how can we rebuild trust in government if the political class itself appears to be dissembling.
In the face of continuing revelations related to the public works scandals, the ruling majority’s grip on power appears to be weakening as our politicians turn against each other. Our congressmen and senators are now in open verbal warfare. The freshly installed majority in the Senate appears to be in danger of collapsing.
The dominant faction emerging after the election of Bongbong Marcos in 2022 seemed omnipotent at the beginning. But it succumbed to its own project of dynastic continuity.
The person in charge of this project, Martin Romualdez, attempted to change the Constitution early on. That attempt was so clumsily managed. It relied entirely on funding congressmen to gather signatures for Charter change. The congressmen simply pocketed the funds. The political project collapsed almost as soon as it began.
Unable to continue along the route of altering the constitutional order, the effort abruptly changed course. Again, relying on the illusory power of congressmen who simply wanted another source of funding, Romualdez and company targeted Vice President Sara Duterte. She was seen as a hindrance to dynastic continuity, vastly overshadowing Romualdez’s popularity.
The goal this time was to discredit Sara, have her impeached by a cooperative Senate and banned from holding public office.
This strategy seemed entirely doable. The congressmen of the majority coalition will sign anything in exchange for public works projects. We saw that when, on a moment’s notice, they lined up to sign the impeachment complaint last February.
But the Senate was not very cooperative. Nor was the Supreme Court, which pointed out the unconstitutionality by which the impeachment complaint was signed and delivered.
At this point, it does not seem possible to revive the discredited impeachment complaint. The transactional legislators will not likely cooperate with this sort of unpopular political project unless they are richly rewarded. The scandal over the looting of infra funds through congressional insertions guarantees there will be no funds available to win legislative support.
The project of dynastic continuity is now dead in the water. Its principal architect and intended beneficiary has been consigned to the gallery of political rogues. It is inconceivable he could ever be politically rehabilitated.
This political project had a fatal flaw. It was entirely reliant on transactional politics. Therefore, it needed a large volume of undocumented funds constantly flowing to buy political support. Such funds can only be produced through systematic looting of the budget. It required a mafia of legislators, bureaucrats and unscrupulous contractors to plunder public funds on a sustained basis.
The political project of dynastic continuity collapsed under the weight of unbridled greed. The perpetrators were not loyal to the political project. They pocketed the loot and betrayed their own principals.
The public works scandal did not just blow up in the faces of the main perpetrators. It blew up on the entire system of patronage politics that passed itself off as a democracy.
Now we need to reinvent our entire system of politics.