Incompetence made worse by indifference (2)

What makes this time different is not the suffering itself — Filipinos have endured hardship under every administration — but the growing sense that the suffering is being deliberately ignored.

The President speaks of economic recovery while families have to skip meals. He attempted to gaslight the public by declaring success in reducing the poverty incidence to single digits when its parameters were obviously outdated, if not outright obsolete given inflation and the high cost of living. The budget department touts infrastructure spending while floodwaters swallow the very projects meant to hold the waters back.

The spate of anti-Marcos protests that have erupted across the country are not over a single grievance. It is the confluence of many — the flood control scandal, the unrelenting inflation, the fuel price hikes, the sense that the government is more responsive to foreign investors and political allies than to the people who placed their trust in them to do what is in the best interest of the many and not just a few.

These protests are not merely a rejection of one policy or one official. They are a rejection of a style of governance that treats the public as an audience to be managed rather than a constituency to be served.

The administration’s response has been predictably defensive. It dismisses the protesters as destabilizers, questions their motives and appeals to their sense of “unity.” But unity cannot be demanded; it must be inspired. And it cannot be expected when the government appears more concerned with protecting its own from accountability than with addressing the daily indignities of the governed.

The more the Palace dismisses the anger as the work of a few, the more it confirms that it has lost touch with the many.

Every administration eventually faces a reckoning. For the Marcos government, that reckoning has a date: 2028. The next presidential election will not simply be a contest between personalities or parties. It will be a referendum on whether the Filipino people are willing to accept more of the same — or whether they will demand accountability for the suffering they have endured.

The signs are already there. The protests, the social media outrage, the quiet desperation in households across the country — these are the early tremors of a political earthquake. The administration can choose to ignore them, as it has chosen to ignore so much else. But ignoring the water does not make it recede. It only means one will surely be unprepared for the certain deluge.

We, the Filipino people, are not asking for miracles. We are asking for competence. We are asking for honesty. We are asking for a government that does not treat our suffering as collateral damage in a game of power and profit. If the Marcos administration cannot provide that, then the road to 2028 will be paved with demands — for accountability, for justice and for a government that finally understands that it serves the people, not the other way around.

More crucially, is there really still anyone out there who is insane (read: selfless and patriotic) who will run for public office because they sincerely just want to do good for the country? After all, who in their right mind would be willing to spend hundreds of millions (billions for the presidency) to get elected to an office where the total salaries and benefits on paper will not even be enough to cover the cost of a political advertisement?