Will Manila wilt when Godzilla roars?

Will Manila wilt when Godzilla roars? | Daily Tribune

Here’s the question: Is a government dealing with slowing growth, high inflation, corruption scandals, volatile oil prices, and the impeachment trial of the Vice President ready?

First, the economic fundamentals. In April 2026, the Asian Development Bank cut its Philippine GDP growth forecast from 5.3 percent to 4.4 percent. In August, the World Bank further downgraded it to 3.7 percent. Slowing growth means narrowing fiscal space, and El Niño demands large-scale investment — irrigation, seeds, subsidies, food reserves, energy allocation.

Then there’s inflation. Driven by the Middle East conflict pushing oil prices higher, Philippine inflation jumped from 2.4 percent in March to 4.1 percent, then soared to 7.2 percent in April; food inflation rose to 6.1 percent, with rice prices up 13.7 percent.

In terms of energy, the country’s power mix relies heavily on hydropower, and a drought would directly cut reservoir generation capacity. Oriental Mindoro is facing peak demand of 75.31 megawatts against only 56.5 MW of reliable supply — a gap of nearly 19 MW — forcing rotating blackouts.

The Visayas grid triggered a red alert in May, with Metro Cebu implementing manual load shedding. More seriously, two 500-kilovolt Luzon-Visayas lines tripped in succession in May, losing over 2,462 MW and affecting about 3.9 million users. Congress has launched an investigation into the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines.

This is not a problem that appeared only when El Niño arrived — it is a structural vulnerability that El Niño will amplify.

Politically, the ongoing Senate impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte is consuming governance bandwidth. The House prosecutors dropped the bribery charge, but the articles on confidential funds, grave threats, and unexplained wealth are being heard.

Intensive trial sessions will be suspended in October during the national budget deliberations and resume in November. This means the critical window for a climate response — October to December — is precisely when the impeachment case will be most intense and political attention most divided.

Governance energy is finite, and “Godzilla” will not slow down just because Manila is fighting a political war.

The government is not entirely inactive. The Department of Agriculture has activated its El Niño task force, targeting P1 billion in aid to farmers and fisherfolk, with another P1.6 billion for solar irrigation projects.

The National Food Authority is accelerating rice processing in Bicol and Mindanao to build buffer stocks. The Department of Energy is set to stabilize the power supply and accelerate new plant construction and transmission grid expansion.

All these point in the right direction, but compared to the coming shock, they might just be a drop in the bucket.

The judgment is simple. The Philippine government is not unprepared, but its preparations are taking place amid multiple overlapping crises — constrained finances, a cracked energy system, political attention diverted by an impeachment, and inflation compressing the buffer space of households and businesses.

What it faces is not a question of “can it cope” but of “how much of the bottom line can it hold” while resources are pulled in every direction.

The most vulnerable — low-income families, rain-dependent farmers, communities already short of power and water — will bear the heaviest blow.

Resilience is not a slogan; it requires budgeting, coordination, and political will simultaneously.

And those three are precisely what — unfortunately — Manila seems to be in most dire need of.