When President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. delivered his bland New Year’s message to the nation, only his amateur propagandists and members of the Marcos-Romualdez faction applauded, along with the claque of trolls and crones. As in previous New Year’s Day messages, he latched on to the Filipino resilience as the reason why the nation survives, never mind the incompetence, indolence and insanity that permeates an administration that was digitized by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) into existence.
First, Marcos Jr. is not exactly the kind of leader who inspires a people whose voters, aided by social media disinformation, purportedly chose him to lead the nation in May 2022. For the past two years, he failed to improve Philippine agriculture despite his insistence that he would fix the problem of farm production. Instead, he brought the rice industry to seed, choked by unremitting importations under the Rice Tariffication Law (RTL) packaged by the equally indolent Rodrigo Duterte administration. Marcos Jr. reminds us of Leslie Nielsen’s quip: “Doing nothing is very hard to do… you never know when you’re finished.”
This explains his dozens of foreign trips, his watching F1 races in Singapore at the invitation of a Malaysia-born Singaporean tycoon now enmeshed in a bribery case as if watching such races would lure billions of dollars to the Philippines, even as the country goes to seed, battered by typhoons, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and man-made calamities. It doesn’t help him that Singapore has become a favorite parking space for ill-gotten wealth, from dictators to Chinese online scammers engaged in pig slaughter and crypto fraudsters from Cyprus to Eastern Europe. Who says a lily-white Singapore cannot host the worst enemies of struggling economies?
Embarking on several trips to Japan and the US did not attract investments that Finance Secretary Ralph Recto thought would raise the country to middle-income economies. Hope, like illusion, lasts forever. Palace jokers have been kidding the country that Marcos Jr. will improve the country’s economy the way Duterte roared that he would end the drug menace in six months, dump the blood of criminals in Manila Bay and skewer corruption in high places, ending his soliloquy with “change is coming.” The people got scammed as he borrowed so much that he more than doubled the national debt, surpassing all the money borrowed by previous presidents.
In describing Duterte as well as his spawn, Filipinos should be tempted to recall what a French nobleman said about Parolles in “All’s Well That Ends Well”— “He’s a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner of no one good quality.” Add what Thersites told Ajax in “Troilus and Cressida”: “Thou sodden-witted lord; thou hast no more brain than I have in mine elbows.” This explains why Duterte Sr. and Duterte Jr. have deliberately boycotted legislative hearings, refused to answer serious questions about the use of public money to finance 3,000 murders in Davao City and 30,000 killings during the “war on drugs” from 2016 to 2022, and the thousands more slaughtered under Duterte Sr.’s counterinsurgency drive as reinforced by Memo Circular No. 32 and Executive Order No. 70.
The Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) criticized Marcos Jr.’s New Year message for being hollow, a mere echo chamber-style reiteration of “Filipino resilience” as a virtue that keeps the republic whole. The issue is not “resilience” but the incompetence of his administration, and its criminal accountability for failing to provide relief to millions of overburdened citizens. People have to live and they have to scrounge around, overwork themselves, and keep their kith and kin together. “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how,” said Friedrich Nietzche, a maxim that shows overcoming crises is the “ikigai” or “raison d’etre” of life itself.
It is not the duty of Marcos Jr. to glorify “Filipino resilience” while evading accountability for his glaring failure to address disasters, inflation, and systemic poverty, KMP argued. “President Marcos praises Filipino resilience as if it absolves his administration of its criminal neglect. The catastrophic disasters of 2024—from severe drought to typhoons—exposed how unprepared and uncaring this government truly is. Farmers at the forefront of these crises were left to fend for themselves without adequate disaster response, production subsidies, or compensation,” said Danilo Ramos, KMP chairperson and Makabayan senatorial candidate. Successive typhoons, along with a crippling El Niño, left billions of pesos in damage to agriculture, yet the government’s response was limited to tokenistic aid and delayed interventions. Farmers received neither sufficient financial assistance nor systemic support to recover what they had lost.
“How can he urge Filipinos to look forward with hope when skyrocketing prices of rice, fuel, utilities, and basic goods make daily survival an uphill battle? The President’s promise of a ‘Bagong Pilipinas’ is nothing but a cruel farce,” Ramos added. KMP also took a swipe at Congress, which touted its productivity. “This is no more than just empty boasting. While over 160 measures have been enacted into law, none addresses the chronic issues of landlessness, rural poverty, or food insecurity.” Agrarian reform is in the doldrums, rural poverty is worsening. Yet, Congress basks in approving unlimited rice importations and extending foreign land leases to 99 years, which eventually would gobble up land that should be for landless farmers.
