‘Senate of the People’

The Senate is building itself a palace. P23.5 billion. BGC. Eleven stories ascend to prove importance; three descend to hide what remains of their conscience.

Twelve hundred parking bays. Terraces broad enough to host some small nation.

How noble. How considerate. How dare you.

Senators may call it progress, a symbol of vision.

We call it the most elaborate act of self-congratulation ever poured onto public land.

It is not an argument in favor of efficiency, except that it will arrive, like clockwork, in 2028, ensuring senators are admired for foresight instead of questioned for what it was built to hide.

The project began at P8.9 billion. Today it is estimated at P33 billion.

The DPWH signs. Hilmarc’s Construction, a firm cited in previous controversies, pours the concrete. No one asks whether it should be built. Only how fast.

Senators debate bills, oversight, budgets. Will the building make the senators wiser? Will it make the nation safer?

It will only give them bigger offices, higher ceilings, longer corridors through which to admire themselves.

If wisdom were measured by the same square meters, the floods would have drained, classrooms would have stood, the voters might’ve learned by now.

Contrast this with the old Senate building in Pasay. Decrepit, humble, yes, but functional. Obedient to reality.

Step outside and a senator might smell Diwata Pares and witness the coin-to-coin household math surviving on less than a single legislative clause.

The Pasay building whispers to the occupants, “You are responsible.” In BGC, it whispers: “You are important.”

The old building works. The light is still on and the committees meet. The plenaries convene. The staff do their jobs. Nothing needs marble to function.

Because the cracks are not in the walls but in the will to serve.

While hospitals overflow and classrooms collapse and floods arrive on schedule and relief never does, no emergency rivals the haste to build a Senate palace.

Alternatives? Ignored. Patch up the old place, split a few offices, stretch a corridor — too cheap. Why repair what signals nothing, when you can build a palace that signals everything?

The law may tip its hat. As if formality could excuse a single peso spent; but a project may be lawful and still be wrong.

The new Senate building will open its doors right on schedule.

What it will show, however handsomely framed, is a republic in decline pretending it has ascended.

The senators will cut the ribbon, the halls will gleam, they will call it “Senate of the People.”

Then the nation on the other side of the glass will look up and wonder, “When did our servants become our sovereigns?”