Who’s minding the store?

Which Palace-adjacent socialite, Nosy Tarsee asks, fresh from a well-stamped passport, was just handed a commissionership that doesn’t match her credentials?

We are told to “give her a chance.” We are not told that her father is a high Palace executive. The Palace spokeswoman, usually quick to pounce, seems to have missed that detail.

The appointment fits a pattern. A disbarred lawyer was made the President’s adviser. A sportsman turned politician now heads another commission.

Which small, shadowy circle keeps whispering these names into the President’s ear? Nosy Tarsee’s Palace snoops say the same hands that vetted the socialite are now polishing a comeback.

Which Cabinet member, widely rumored to be returning to his old post, has had his people deny it? The Palace denied it. The President denied it too, between meetings at a motor race. When three denials arrive this quickly, suspicion rises.

The rumored return is reportedly meant to let him preside over a slew of projects rushed for completion before the term ends. Rushed projects mean quick contracts.

The much-advertised rehabilitation of the capital’s main artery was promised to last five years. But not two weeks into the first rains, the road was pocked with holes bigger than adolescent acne scars. The blame went to the busway barriers, never the contractors.

Which contractor, Nosy Tarsee hinted, awarded billions across two phases of that rehabilitation, also turns out to be a petitioner in the case that won a restraining order against the capital region’s P85 wage increase? And why did the labor department so readily enforce it?

Workers are denied P85 a day, while the road they commute on crumbles. Ask who benefits from both.

Then there is the “model” drainage system the President was brought to inspect in June, so proudly that it was to be replicated for P1.5 billion along two major thoroughfares. When the monsoon came, the model street went back to being the river it has always been.

Meanwhile, appointments keep coming, denials keep coming, and the elections draw closer. Appointees are being moved like chess pieces by the kingmakers who are playing them.