Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio relishes byzantine dynastic politics. She is typically “adelantado” in Spanish, one who thinks that, being the early bird, she will always catch the worm. This explains why she accepted the offer to run as vice president to Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in 2022, blunting the plot to draft Christopher Lawrence “Bong” Go as the anointed one by her father, the unlamented Rodrigo Duterte.
By now, people will know that rather than being the early bird, Sara is actually the early worm, too early in the fray for 2028 that in probability, she may not even be available to run for any position given the results of the May 12, 2025 senatorial race that hopefully will not be influenced by the sponsored surveys by the Marcos Jr. regime and the Duterte camp. From the get-go, Sara wanted to hold the defense portfolio, but the more rational elements in the Marcos Jr. inner sanctum denied her the appointment and instead threw her to the Department of Education (DepEd), which she tried to militarize on the pretext that it is being targeted by “terrorists” out to recruit minors to fight a guerrilla war.
As early as 2022, Sara already violated the law by demanding her share of confidential and intelligence funds (CIFs) despite the fact that the Office of the Vice President (OVP) under then Vice President Leni Robredo never got a single centavo of CIFs for six years. Moreover, the second semester of 2022 was covered by the Robredo budget and by insisting on getting P125 million in CIF and spending the entire sum in 11 days, she violated the law. The 2022 national budget did not allocate a single centavo for that purpose. What she got was money from the Contingent Fund (CF) of the Office of the President (OP) for which she is accountable, according to Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin. Has the OP demanded an accounting of the money that the OP released to her? If not, then Bersamin’s office should demand that Duterte Jr. must explain what happened to the money.
As a spare tire, Sara knew that she had the period 2023 to 2028 as a pretty long campaign period for her to ascend to the presidency. So, she made hay. Thus, the thousands of “informants” to whom she paid rewards for unexplained “missions,” the millions spent for luxurious “safehouses” at Bonifacio Global City, and the rest of the funds she dispatched to beneficiaries that included students, orphans and hospital patients captured the limelight. Not only did the OVP fabricate thousands of dubious names in direct contempt of auditors and lawmakers, Sara repeated the same caper at the DepEd, with counter-insurgency school activities funded by the Philippine Army (PA) and local government units (LGUs) falsely categorized as being sponsored by her department. Military officers swore that Sara did not spend a single red penny on those activities. But why lie? It must have been because of the Duterte DNA and her belief that sincerity is not needed in politics, a very profound statement. She must remember what Elbert Hubbard said: “Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.”
Just as the Duterte political dynasty never accounted for the P2.7-billion in CIFs for Davao City, Sara could also not account for the hundreds of millions of pesos in funds in stashed away in regional DepEd offices, the plagiarized book project for young readers, the appointment of military officers in her security detail as “special disbursing officers” contrary to the rules of the Commission on Audit (COA), the hundreds of millions spent for the leases or purchases of 13 OVP satellite offices and three extension offices. When ACT Teachers Rep. France Castro exposed her financial shenanigans, Duterte Jr. tagged her as a “criminal” convicted by the Davao court that did not admit the defense evidence, as Castro and former Bayan Muna Rep. Satur Ocampo rescued students and teachers terrorized by paramilitary men. The decision over the “child trafficking” is on appeal. Worse, she even demanded the ouster of Marikina Rep. Stella Quimbo from the panel investigating her financial abuse, all because she discovered that the CIF was disbursed in the 11 dying days of 2022.
To be honest, Sara never accomplished anything significant since June 30, 2022, aside from flying to Germany to watch a Taylor Swift concert while Metro Manila was being flooded and hundreds of thousands were being evacuated. That’s leadership for you. And the top leadership position is what she covets. At the DepEd, it was established that she was giving her subordinates monthly “allowances” as high as P50,000, and these underlings were handling such tedious jobs as heading bids and awards committees, computerization programs and school building projects. For the two years that she headed the DepEd, the performance of Filipino pupils went south under established global metrics. Sara even quarreled with educational aids like charts placed in school rooms. She wanted the walls to be blank, much like clean conscience that has never been used. With more reports of scams hounding her, Sara was compelled to leave the DepEd, and millions of teachers, pupils, students, and parents collectively heaved a sigh of relief.
Yet, with the arrest of the Rodrigo Duterte on March 11, 2025, Sara thinks she will now have the opportunity to steamroll her enemies, bamboozle Malacanang and create a situation for the ouster of Marcos Jr. Days ago, she went on the offensive, demanding that the people of Tondo kick out Rep. Rolando Valeriano, whose mistake was to reveal that Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio had her own “ayuda” program for 997,615 beneficiaries in Metro Manila from 2023 to 2025. This was a clear case of turf invasion, but which could only be interpreted as a doleout in aid of presidential ambition in 2028. For this, Sara cursed and body-shamed Valeriano in her Tondo stump for Isko Moreno, slamming his creaking voice and his “oversized neck.” Too gothic even for Tondo denizens, voters were not swayed by Sara’s philippic. Apparently, she hasn’t learned much about decorum and “urbanidad,” or even read Rev. John Wesley who counseled: “We should be rigorous in judging ourselves and gracious in judging others.”
Sara can go on cursing and demonizing people but the fact remains that in her three years outside their political kingdom, Duterte Jr. hasn’t anything accomplished anything worthy of popular acceptance. She operates on the basis of the same scam foisted upon the Filipino people by her father, from exterminating millions of supposed drug addicts but adding more drug users when he left office, corruption ran rampant, from the sweetheart deals cadged by Dennis Uy on the Malampaya oil field, to the P16-billion Pharmally scam, the billions more disbursed for purchases of Covid-19 vaccines, the supply of face shields and personal protection equipment, to the POGOs and the near-Chinese control of the power distribution sector, to the 2,500 flood control projects that never mitigated flooding, even in Davao City, to the enactment of the despicable Rice Liberation Law (RLL) that is killing the farm sector. Ask Sara about policy, about her recommendations to improve the lives of majority of our people and she cant articulate anything. “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people,” Eleanor Roosevelt said. The country doesn’t need small minds. We’ve had many of those since 2016. (DIEGO MORRA)
