False political choices

By Herman M. Lagon

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.

Stepping back to look at this situation objectively requires the same calm, balanced evaluation that seasoned educators use every single day when managing a chaotic school environment. A fair school principal does not ignore a major case of academic dishonesty or a missing school budget just because the roof of the main gymnasium is leaking, nor do they cancel classes to focus exclusively on fixing a wall. Good management requires looking at the entire picture, seeing how the pieces connect, and refusing to let one crisis excuse another. When we look at the messy history of our national infrastructure projects without partisan blinders, it becomes clear that the long trail of substandard concrete and suspicious contracts does not belong to just one political family. A truly independent, thorough investigation into our drainage budgets would likely expose structural failures stretching across several past administrations, which means that addressing both the infrastructure mess and the political trial serves the public interest rather than the shifting fortunes of rival political dynasties.

The real danger of swallowing this either-or narrative is that it trains citizens to accept a broken, compromised system as long as they get a few crumbs of temporary relief. When political networks tell teachers, workers, and commuters to ignore institutional transparency for the sake of immediate concrete pouring, they are quietly asking the public to permanently lower their expectations of what a government should be. It turns the relationship between the taxpayer and the state into a transactional compromise, suggesting that a developing country must choose between honest leaders and dry streets. This low bar ensures that neither problem ever gets fixed in a meaningful way. A political class that is completely excused from constitutional oversight because it claims to be busy building roads will inevitably end up building roads that wash away in three months, simply because there is no one left with the power to double-check the thickness of the cement.

Ultimately, a country that wishes to progress cannot allow its national attention span to be divided by those who fear transparency. The public must reject the artificial choices manufactured by individuals who benefit from institutional blindness and weak public memory. National growth is not a single-file line where justice has to wait quietly behind public works; it is a shared space where physical safety and administrative honesty keep each other standing. A community can withstand a massive typhoon if its infrastructure is solid, just as a democracy can survive a political crisis if its institutions remain strong and trustworthy. The ultimate test of our maturity as a voting public is our firm refusal to compromise on either front, ensuring that while the mud is cleaned from our school classrooms, the deep-seated culture of impunity is finally cleared from our public offices.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a ”student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.