The first strike was at the State of the Nation Address (Sona) last July, when President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. appeared to be scolding the corrupt, blurting out so confidently, “Mahiya naman kayo!” only to be met with resounding applause and loud cheers by the people he was addressing.
It was a curious moment, patently Pinoy politics, that’s difficult to make sense of. Weren’t the House and the Senate the ones being addressed? Wasn’t this the dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s only male offspring speaking? Finally, why did they all seem like they were congratulating themselves?
A little more than two weeks later, Marcos Jr. brought the Malacañang press corps with him to inspect a flood control project in Bulacan that was supposedly marked “complete” but was still nothing more than a few slabs of concrete, steel trusses, and dust. The project cost us taxpayers ₱55 million.
Four days before this inspection, he released a list of the top 15 Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) contractors for flood control projects. No. 2 was Alpha & Omega General Contractor and Development Corp. and No. 3 was St. Timothy Construction Corp., two companies we now know to be owned by Curlee and Sarah Discaya.
This dragged Pasig Mayor Vico Sotto into the royal rumble who finally had to speak up on news anchors Korina Sanchez’s and Julius Babao’s interviews of the Discaya couple prior to the 2025 elections. The Discayas’ lavish display of wealth also made many Filipinos question how other contractors and their children were able to afford their luxurious lives.
What followed was the purging of online “influencers” and celebrities, a crackdown on these networks of corruption, the clamor for the heads of former Ako Bicol Rep. Zaldy Co and House Speaker Martin Romualdez, and even heavier rain.
The high point must have been last Sept. 21, a Sunday—the 53rd anniversary of Marcos Sr.’s declaration of martial law—when the people rallied in Luneta and the youth charged to Mendiola, demanding accountability for all the crimes that have now been made too apparent and too commonplace in government.
In the weeks leading to the protests, the Senate had been holding its own investigations, its own serye of pointing fingers and conjuring lousier and lousier witnesses to avert blame. A more proper analogy, I guess, is how Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam, Tweety Bird, Wile E. Coyote, Roadrunner, and their other friends from the Looney Tunes would pass a ticking bomb around and it goes kaboom in the hands of the least clever one in the group. Our senators were doing, are doing, just that.
Lucky for all of them, Manila Mayor Isko Moreno, along with the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, is defusing the bomb and is filing cases against 97 anti-corruption protesters. Status quo is restored and a strong message is sent: “The system finds nothing wrong with the corruption committed by the ones in power. But there is something wrong with protesting and vandalizing government infrastructure.”
But as the noise is deliberately silenced by proponents of the state, there remain certain questions hovering over my head and they take me back to the earlier half of 2025, or what I believe should give context to all this scandal and corruption.
Power play
What I found curious about Marcos Jr.’s Sona is that it hardly mentioned anything about the Dutertes—only that bit about Gen. Nicolas Torre III’s boxing stunt—and it somehow garnered approval from the corrupt and the anti-corrupt alike, for lack of better categorizations. The President’s speech started strong, yes, when he admitted how his party’s loss in the midterm elections indicated a general disapproval of his leadership. But in his usual stuttering fashion, it descended into a pointless enumeration of things nobody asked to hear. Then he closed with an odd, misplaced battle cry against corruption.
If in the previous year, the main criticism hurled his way was that the hundreds of flood control projects he bragged about in his 2024 Sona were all massively ineffective, this year he made use of the event to wash his hands of ever having a role in those flood control projects. In the succeeding weeks, he rolled out a blitz which Malacañang’s own communications would use to clear the President of ever having anything to do with those projects he paraded the year before.
During his Sona, however, Marcos Jr.’s most definitive moves had been his facilitation of former president Rodrigo Duterte’s arrest by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in March and the impeachment complaint against Vice President Sara Duterte which the Senate and the Supreme Court had summarily junked in July. And yet, there is zero mention of any of these. Asked about Sara Duterte’s impeachment, he mentions respecting the Congress’ and the Supreme Court’s moves. Asked about the former president’s arrest, he mentions the ICC and the complainants who brought him to court.
It is clear that his acting deadma is power play. But before we congratulate him for winning these two battles in their war with the Dutertes, it is best to take a step back and to view Marcos Jr.’s silence on certain issues in the same lenses his father, the dictator, had used silence in his 21-year rule—as a cloak for lies and to feign innocence.
What all these controlled projections indicate is that the Marcos Jr. administration has a plan or, at least, it had one. Surely, it wants the Dutertes out and done with, for 2028 and beyond. But after two big moves, the dynasty from Davao City remains standing.
Marcos Jr. playbook
Another thing we’ve always known is how this Marcos is much like his father in how the dictator employed brains bigger than his in matters he knew nothing about. That has always been part of the Marcos playbook. If we had Juan Ponce Enrile, Fidel V. Ramos, Fabian Ver, Francisco Tatad, Edgardo Angara, Imelda Marcos, and others doing Marcos Sr.’s dirty work in the ’70s, we have now Boying Remulla, Jonvic Remulla, Vince Dizon, Ralph Recto, Lucas Bersamin (resigned, supposedly), Liza Araneta-Marcos, and Romualdez. (Clearly, there have been a lot of vacancies of late.)
And now with the Independent Commission for Infrastructure’s (ICI) chairperson Andres Reyes Jr. preaching Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach’s “What the world needs now is love…,” I don’t think we’d have much of a chance at getting the ball rolling again. I know the ICI’s purpose is to investigate and to build strong cases against politicians and contractors involved in these deals, but it just feels so dire when you know that these perpetrators have built legal muscle, are extremely moneyed by our taxes, and have been operating “legally” for far too long.
I find it hard to imagine how, after the seismic shifts in the past three months, literally and metaphorically, the Marcos and the Dutertes seem to be at a stalemate in this corruption scandal, and both sides remain just as powerful as they once were. This “flood control gate” won’t seem to be renewed for a second season if the Marcoses and the Dutertes do not finally take bold moves and together drag the other down to Hell.
In the weekend that was, sure, there were bombshells from Zaldy Co’s hologram and from Imee Marcos speaking on the stage set by the supposedly disgruntled Iglesia ni Cristo. But none of these add up to anything close to coherent and to qualify their moves to mean anything at all is an insult even to the dullest political analysts—they’re obviously all smoke and mirrors. A hair follicle test after Duterte’s failed “drug war”? A paternity test, when all we want to know is where our money went and who spent it? And gazillionaire Zaldy Co’s cheap editing skills in the time of TikTok? Seriously?
How we got here
So, let’s try to recall how we got here so we can draw our way forward:
Sara Duterte was in the right in October 2024 when she said she would personally dig Marcos Sr.’s corpse out of the Libingan ng mga Bayani and toss it out to the West Philippine Sea. While that moment was comedy gold, the weight it held was powerful because if there was anyone responsible for single-handedly breaking down the institutions of the Philippines, it was Marcos Sr. himself. If there’s anyone to blame for the drastic loss of forestland, the consequent flawed mining laws, and the haphazard implementation of a development plan in Metro Manila that ultimately led to the miserable state of the capital, it’s the dead dictator. So that’s one point for Sara.
I would also tend to agree that Sara Duterte could invoke her right to free speech when she went on record, detailing how she had hired someone “to kill BBM, Liza Araneta-Marcos, and Martin Romualdez. No joke.” However, I would grant that point to Marcos Jr. because it gave them a handle with which to impeach Sara in Congress. Her office’s confidential funds were a great talking point, but in the final count, it’s the video and her temper that got her shot down.
So, impeach Sara, they did. And had the impeachment pushed through in the Senate, then we’d be feasting on the scandal of the Dutertes’ riches, not this embarrassment of the many contractors and the politicians backing them.
A point to Marcos Jr. for flying the old man Rodrigo to The Hague, but just one point because Malacañang hasn’t fully cooperated and re-joined the ICC.
The Dutertes, however, have remained an immovable wall with their unrestrained trips abroad, Kitty’s drama and shindigs, and their way early campaigning. So far, their narrative of Rodrigo being “kidnapped” has proven impenetrable for the Marcoses’ ends, no matter how unfounded that story is. So, that’s another point for them.
The scores are tied, if you ask me. While Marcos Jr. has captured Duterte’s bishop Apollo Quiboloy and while we await for the ICC to arrest Duterte’s horse and rook, Bong Go and Bato dela Rosa, respectively, it’s clear that these would mean nothing when the queen can still be seen throwing her weight and moving around so freely. What the flood control drama leads us to are the pawns, the errant dynasties and cronies in the House and in the Senate, loyal to whichever president signed their budgets from 2016 to today…which can be a Duterte or a Marcos.
With all the incestuous relationships formed inside those halls of elite Pinoy politics, I am quite sure these politicos are just seeing all this as a tiny squabble between two siblings (with the unlovable gargoyle, Imee Marcos, on the side). In the end, they would just let the rivalries slide. I can clearly imagine them laughing at us, people they would never ever meet or even bother to look at for one second in their entire lives, and they’ll say that these projects and kickbacks never really mattered, anyway, while family—their family—is everything.
