The elephants fight, the poor drown

The theater of political war in Manila has reached a sickening pitch.

Between the high-stakes Senate impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte and the Supreme Court’s historic invalidation of unconstitutional budget allocations, the capital is consumed by a fierce battle for survival between the Marcos and Duterte factions.

Yet, while the ruling elite exchange legal blows and secure their dynastic political strongholds, a physical catastrophe is unfolding outside the halls of power.

For the poorest Filipinos, this political bloodsport isn't entertainment—it is a weapon of mass distraction that is actively killing them.

The complete collapse of the 2022 “UniTeam” coalition has devolved into a multi-front war of attrition driven purely by ego and self-preservation.

While congressmen obsess over auditing confidential funds to weaponize them against rivals, the everyday machinery of governance has ground to a halt. The immediate casualties are the marginalized households living hand-to-mouth.

Rice inflation surged to a punishing 20.3 percent, according to recent data, hitting an even more brutal 23.6 percent for the bottom 30 percent of Filipino families.

As politicians quibble over billions in hidden funds, regular milled rice sits stuck at an average retail price of nearly P50 per kilogram, effectively pricing out the nation's poorest laborers from their basic daily meals.

This administrative neglect becomes physically destructive when the rainy season hits. The Supreme Court's recent striking down of the budget exposed hundreds of billions of pesos in corrupt, unconstitutional lump-sum allocations—heavily tied to supposed "flood-control" projects.

Where did that money go? It certainly didn't go to infrastructure. As Super Typhoon Rosal swept through, communities across Northern Luzon, Cagayan, and Batanes were battered by torrential rain, flash floods, and landslides.

For regional farmers and informal settlers, this unchecked political greed materializes as submerged communities, washed-out roads, and ruined agricultural land. Millions of pesos worth of crops destroyed, creating a vicious cycle that further spikes food prices.

A profound, dangerous disconnect characterizes the contemporary Philippine state. The political elite are playing a high-stakes game of chess, using the judiciary, the Senate floor, and state resources as their personal board.

Meanwhile, the average Filipino is playing a daily game of economic checkers—calculating whether they can afford to eat, survive the next storm, or pay for a clinic visit.

But if we are honest, the tragedy of the Philippines is not just that its politicians are opportunistic; it is that our collective amnesia allows them to remain in power.

We express outrage on social media as floodwaters rise to our roofs, yet we treat elections like entertainment, trading our democratic power for cheap celebrity endorsements, catchy jingles, and short-lived handouts.

We continue to line up at the ballot box to vote for the very same surnames that have systematically underfunded our hospitals, compromised our agricultural safety nets, and pocketed the budgets meant to keep our children safe from drowning.

This cycle of elite entitlement cannot be broken until the Filipino electorate shifts from passive spectators to ruthless auditors. As the 2028 presidential and general elections approach, voters must stop viewing their ballots as entry tickets to a dynastic fan club.

True voter accountability means asking the hard questions that the elite want you to forget. We must demand to see the receipts of their "flood-control" funds before we give them our trust.

We must measure a candidate's worth not by the depth of their family's pockets or the fierceness of their political mudslinging, but by their concrete plans to lower food prices and fortify our communities against systemic ruin.

A democracy cannot run indefinitely on reality-TV-style political spectacles. While the elite exhaust the nation's focus and deplete financial reserves to protect their family names ahead of upcoming elections, the country is fraying at the seams.

When the palace elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled. The ultimate metric of a successful government is not whether an opponent is successfully impeached—it is whether a citizen can safely cross a street during a typhoon and afford a bowl of rice at the end of the day.

If the public continues to reward transactional theater at the polls, we will remain a nation underwater, forever wondering why the rain keeps taking everything we own.