When truth threatens power, it is never confronted with courage. Instead, it is smothered, twisted, and drowned under a carefully orchestrated noise machine. This is exactly what we see in the ongoing investigations in the Senate and the House of Representatives, where corruption in flood control projects and budget insertions should have been exposed with clarity—but instead, the proceedings are being turned into a circus. The institutions that should be instruments of accountability have become tools of manipulation.
At the heart of the controversy lies the brain behind the budget insertions—the Speaker of the House. Yet instead of piercing through the layers of deceit, the investigations are being clouded by diversions. Political allies scramble to shield the Speaker, employing every trick in the book to make the narrative about anything but the rot within. Even the sitting President, BBM himself, positions as if he were an innocent spectator to the mess, playing the role of someone detached from the corrupt machinery that fuels his administration’s projects. But the Filipino people know better: no insertion of that scale could exist without the knowledge and silent blessing of those at the very top.
This charade is not new. The art of burying truth under noise has long been perfected in Philippine politics. Whenever accountability looms too close, the strategy is predictable—shift the narrative, weaponize technicalities, create spectacles in committee hearings, and flood the public discourse with half-truths. In doing so, they hope the people will tire of the chaos and move on. But this time, the stakes are far greater. Billions of pesos meant to protect communities from floods have vanished, and lives have been lost because greed took precedence over governance.
The bigger tragedy is not just the theft of public funds but the theft of public trust. If the very institutions tasked to guard the nation’s coffers are the same ones conspiring to conceal the theft, what remains of democracy? When truth is deliberately buried under noise, what we are left with is not governance but grand deception. And as long as the leaders in power continue to act as though accountability is optional, the cycle of corruption will persist, drowning the country in both literal and moral floods.
The people deserve more than theatrics; they deserve truth. And no matter how much noise the powerful generate, truth has a way of breaking through—it only takes a society that refuses to be distracted.
