What to do?

The social media and to some extent, the print and broadcast media, have been full of lamentations and expressions of anger, frustrations and helplessness about our country’s present poor state. This is not to say that these emotions have not been exhibited before, but their present expressions have become much more intense.

Every day, we read in the media how Filipinos express their views and offer solutions to nearly all the problems that afflict us: our lagging economic development compared with much of Southeast Asia, the poor performance of public elementary and secondary school students, inadequate connectivity among the various islands in terms of transportation (ground, water, and air) and communications infrastructure, widespread and persistent poverty, inadequate health care, and many others. At times, I find myself wondering to whom these proposed solutions are really addressed for implementation. To fellow citizens? On our own, there is nothing we can do, except perhaps undertake a few superficial, token, and ultimately inconsequential actions.

In my mind, these persisting and severe national failures are manifestations of a singular issue: the inability or inaction of our elected government leaders to provide the necessary solutions in adequate amounts and in an effective manner.

No matter how strongly we feel about the implementation of our own perceived solutions, which we routinely express every day, they will just remain, well, expressions, simply because we do not have the authority and do not have control over the funds that are necessary to implement those solutions. It is only our elected government leaders who can implement decisively and effectively the right and adequate solutions. Unfortunately, for a very long time now, these elected leaders utterly failed to do so.

What is much more distressing is that instead of focusing and acting on the necessary steps to solve effectively these difficult problems and issues, these elected leaders engage themselves in acquiring more wealth and prostituting the political systems to gain more authority and power. In the last several months alone, there has been a clear exposure of corrupt conduct by at least some of our legislators through which they have amassed tens, if not hundreds, of billions of the Filipino people’s money. And what is creating much anger in this regard is that, up until now, there has been not even one corruption case, among these recent corruption discoveries, which has been brought to justice.

And just recently, a group of senators conspired to bring surreptitiously into their own chamber a fellow senator, who is a runaway from justice and who had not been reporting for work at the Senate for a long time, for the purpose of casting the decisive vote to enable this group of senators to wrest majority control of that legislative chamber. Not long after the objective was achieved, the runaway senator left the chamber under an apparently contrived condition of great commotion and gunfire to enable him to escape from justice and go and hide in his safe house. These senators, some of them if not all, acted with utmost impunity and postured themselves as supreme and untouchable beings and seemingly not violating any law or transgressing moral standards.

And what I find equally distressing is that I have hardly heard from the other politicians and their political parties any strong and loud voice condemning these actions. Such inaction portrays clearly the absence of effective opposition in our political system, which is a necessary ingredient in maintaining a properly working democracy. Such lack of effective opposition is a consequence of our very weak political party system. Instead, what we have is a political merry-go-round, under which the politicians behave like butterflies who flock to the flower that smells good at the moment and then leave it when its fragrance dries up and then fly to another which has a new and fresh fragrance. This is the reason why we get more of the same, if not worse, whenever there is a change of President and constitution of a new Congress.

The singular solution is obvious. We, the suffering citizens, need to replace completely or most of the present government leaders with another set of new and able leaders who can seriously, adequately and effectively solve our present many severe ills, and, equally important, improve our present governance systems and create an overall structure and network that will promote continuous political, social and economic developments and growth.

To do this, of course, is extremely difficult.

The obvious action to take is through the electoral process. But I believe that this course of action is practically impossible to achieve success. Our voters have become captive by political family dynasties which are deeply entrenched in practically every province, city and town in the whole archipelago for purposes of perpetuating their hold on political power and continuing their wealth aggrandizement. These political dynasties are able to do so through patronage and vote buying. This unhappy condition has developed because of widespread poverty and lack of sufficient education among much of our electorate, which realities the political dynasties probably want to preserve and not fix. Vote buying could have been dealt with successfully if the electoral guardians prosecute some, if not all, of the perpetrators. But they do not. Maybe, because they themselves are appointed by or through the influence of the political dynasties who are the ones buying the votes.

It is indeed an extremely bad situation. But we cannot allow the present terrible condition to continue and remain the same. We need to do something else that may achieve our objective.

Of course, we can hope and wait for the sudden occurrence of a powerful crucible - a concentration of forces that bring change or development. But that is iffy and may not bring the result that we desire.

Clearly, we, the Filipina people, need to take deliberate and concerted action. For this purpose, we need to look for a strong leader or leaders who can find a way and take us there. Or, one or more of us, with sincere and good intentions to uplift the miserable lives of the greater number of our people, take the courage soon to emerge and do what needs to be done.

As published in BusinessWorld, dated 04 June 2026