The Philippines today has a government: complete with institutions, titles, and ceremonies; but very little governing. Power is everywhere, yet authority is nowhere.
The President calls for accountability, but no one is held accountable. The Ombudsman promises justice, but the untouchables remain untouched. The Senate holds hearings, but the only ones punished are the whistleblowers.
We have laws, commissions, committees, and slogans but no consequence.
What began as a flood-control scandal has turned into a full-blown crisis of governance. Billions gone, contractors vanished, and lawmakers implicated; yet not a single arrest. Instead, we saw the opposite: Senator Panfilo Lacson resigning from the Blue Ribbon Committee, Baguio Mayor Benjamin Magalong leaving the Integrity and Corruption Investigation body, and now Justice Secretary Boying Remulla, a political insider, taking over as Ombudsman.
Each resignation is not just an exit. It is a vote of no confidence in the state’s ability to police itself.
Oversight has collapsed. Institutions have surrendered. The government exists, but governance has evaporated.
President Marcos Jr. once promised a clean and competent government: a chance to redeem the family name through reform. Instead, he is surrounded by scandal: flood-control kickbacks, contractor collusion, and political insertions that even his own allies can no longer defend.
His cousin, former Speaker Martin Romualdez, remains uncharged despite being the central figure in congressional racketeering allegations. His supposed firewall, Ombudsman Remulla, is perceived not as an enforcer of accountability but as a protector of power.
BBM’s greatest weakness is not corruption itself; it is inaction. He speaks like a reformer but governs like a caretaker.
When corruption produces no punishment, it becomes culture. When oversight resigns, it becomes complicity. When loyalty outweighs law, the state begins to rot from within.
This is not authoritarianism. It is worse: administrative emptiness. A government that looks intact but is hollow at its core: a regime of forms without function, pronouncements without performance.
The machinery of state runs on autopilot while political families quarrel over spoils.
Sara Duterte sees it. The opposition feels it. The public lives it. The flood of scandals has drowned BBM’s moral authority and opened the 2028 battlefield early. But while the political elite recalibrates, ordinary Filipinos are left in the mud, paying for projects that wash away, trapped in a system where everyone is accountable to someone, except to the public.
Remulla’s Ombudsman can delay cases, silence critics, and bury reports, but it cannot restore faith. Once institutions lose moral credibility, they cannot be rebuilt with spin.
Final Word
This is what government without governing looks like:
- Hearings without truth.
- Laws without justice.
- Power without accountability.
It is a state that exists only to protect itself, a democracy reduced to performance art.
BBM’s tragedy is not that he inherited a broken system. It’s that he has chosen to preserve it. And unless he acts, history will remember his presidency not as a restoration of order, but as the moment when the Republic learned to exist without governance
