WHILE watching rainwater spread across our school grounds, a teacher quietly said, “They should fix the floods first instead of spending money on impeachment.”
It was a sentiment many could relate to. Years of flooding can wear down anyone’s patience. Yet that simple remark also revealed a deeper problem: the growing belief that government must choose between building infrastructure and demanding accountability, when it is expected to do both.
This particular way of thinking did not happen by accident; it has been carefully fed to the public by digital political operations.
Across social media platforms, coordinated networks of commentators, hyper-partisan influencers, and paid defenders have been working overtime to push a very narrow choice into the minds of everyday citizens. They keep repeating the idea that investigating possible constitutional violations is a luxury the country cannot afford while communities are underwater. It creates the impression that we must choose between fixing floods and demanding accountability.
That is a false choice. A functioning government is expected to do both, not one at the expense of the other.
That is how government works. It is not one person trying to juggle every responsibility alone. Different institutions have different mandates that operate at the same time. As Representative Zia Alonto Adiong noted, government is designed to address multiple problems simultaneously, not to stop one constitutional duty because another issue demands attention.
While a Senate committee prepares to hear the serious constitutional charges regarding the management of confidential funds, the entire executive branch continues its daily operations completely undisturbed.
Palace press officers have made it clear that regular Cabinet meetings do not even feature discussions about the ongoing legislative drama, while the NBI and the Office of the Ombudsman continue tracking down infrastructure anomalies independently. Claiming that a political trial completely paralyses public works projects is as absurd as saying a university must cancel all its mathematics classes just because the building maintenance team is busy repairing a leak in the faculty laboratory.
When you look past the loud, defensive rhetoric coming from both political camps, it becomes obvious that the engineering crisis and the constitutional crisis are born from the exact same institutional disease. The multi-billion-peso scams, dummy contractors, and kickbacks uncovered in our national drainage programs are not separate from the conversation about national leadership; they are the literal, physical manifestation of missing oversight.
If public funds meant for river walls end up buying luxury vehicles for an official, that is a failure of responsibility in public works; if discretionary funds are moved around without clear receipts, that is a failure of responsibility in public office.
Kabataan Party List Representative Renee Co hit the nail on the head when she warned that accountability should never be treated like a weapon of convenience, used to attack one person while shielding another. Insisting that we must completely fix the physical flooding before we can dare look at the financial ledgers ignores the obvious truth that unchecked corruption is the exact reason our expensive dikes crumble during the very first storm of the year. (To be continued)/PN
