Where do we take the outrage?

What started as a scandal about shady flood control contracts has snowballed into something bigger. Ever since the President put a spotlight on the issue in his last SoNA, the outrage has spilled out of social media timelines and into the streets.

And the ripple effect has been dramatic. In just a few weeks, we saw the Senate President replaced and the House Speaker forced to resign. Multiple senators and congressmen have been implicated in schemes to plunder the nation’s coffers. Suddenly, the people who used to sit comfortably in high office are now scrambling to clear their names, insisting they were just innocent bystanders while billions were washed away.

The rallies on 21 September, which drew tens of thousands, were the clearest sign yet that ordinary citizens have had enough. It’s not every day you see that many Filipinos braving the heat, the rain, and the traffic to shout in unison: “tama na, sobra na” (enough, that’s enough)!

But here’s the rub. For all the drama, for all the leadership reshuffles, for all the angry headlines and hashtags, not a single one of those implicated has faced a real consequence. No charges. No formal censure. No expulsion from office. We see them on the news every day, still strutting in front of cameras, still pretending to hold the moral high ground.

In the Senate, it has reached peak absurdity, with Senators Jinggoy Estrada and Joel Villanueva taking active roles in an investigation that in part is supposed to look into their own possible culpability. That’s not oversight. That’s mockery. And quite frankly, it is downright insulting.

And then there are the others who have so far escaped mention. What of their accountability? What of Vice President Sara Duterte, whose impeachment just months ago was based in part on her own alleged links to corruption? Her camp is now trying to spin the narrative that she’s somehow untouched by all this. Their message is clear: everybody else is dirty, but not Sara. It’s a painfully obvious attempt to hijack the public anger and convert it into a political succession plan.

This is the danger we face. There’s plenty of anger, plenty of noise, but very little clarity. No serious headway in naming all those actually responsible. No progress in imposing consequences. If this continues, the furor will eventually die down, the guilty will breathe a sigh of relief, and we will find ourselves right back in the familiar territory of corruption as usual.

That is why there has to be a sustained public clamor. We can’t just be content with outrage. The House, the Senate, and now the Independent Commission for Infrastructure all need to be under constant scrutiny. This cannot end as another spectacle. It certainly cannot be allowed to become a tool for equally tainted politicians to push their own self-serving agendas.

There must be consequences. Criminal charges, removal from office, at the very least an official censure. And beyond that, there must be real changes to the rotten system that allowed this scandal to flourish in the first place.

Most importantly, we MUST remember this when it comes time to vote. If we don’t replace the same old names with new, credible ones, then we are simply setting ourselves up for yet another colossal disappointment.

And the next great corruption scandal, and the next round of public outrage, will just be waiting in the wings.