Thursday, 3 July 2025

Still, a Nation Fighting for its Independence

Still, a Nation Fighting for its Independence 

(A Republic Day Message)


The Philippines stands among the wealthiest nations in natural endowment across the global south. Its mountains conceal untapped minerals. Its rivers and seas offer food in abundance. Its people are gifted—resilient, educated, and multilingual, sought after across the world for their skill and spirit. And yet, behind this richness lies a grim reality: millions remain poor, hungry, and unheard. 

According to the state’s own statistics, 17.5 million Filipinos—or 15.5% of the population—live below the national poverty threshold. But even that number hides the deeper crisis. In a December 2024 survey, 63% of Filipino families said they considered themselves poor. This is not poverty by misfortune. This is poverty by design. 


A Broken System, Maintained by the Few

The structure that governs the Philippines today is not built for its people. It is built against them. It is a machine—elegant in appearance, brutal in function—designed to extract, not uplift; to pacify, not empower.

At the surface, it presents itself as a democracy, adorned with elections, political parties, and a constitution. But peel away the layers, and the truth is plain: power in the Philippines resides in the hands of the very few, and always has.

The wealth of the nation does not flow to its villages, its workers, its farmers, or its urban poor. It flows upward—into the vaults of a narrow and incestuous ruling class. These are the old families, the dynasties who survived the fall of colonialism and collaborated with every regime since. These are the compradors who trade national sovereignty for private profit, who answer not to the people but to foreign capital. These are the technocrats, unelected and unaccountable, who speak the language of policy while enacting the will of their patrons.

In this so-called democracy, five families control the airwaves. Ten families own nearly half the arable land. A handful of tycoons dominate the banks, utilities, and the import-export chains. Elections are fought with billions, not ideas. Voters are courted with spectacle, not substance.

Meanwhile, the masses are left with the illusion of choice and the burden of survival. The teacher in the public school cannot afford chalk. The nurse earns less than the politician’s driver. The farmer breaks his back yet dies in debt. The fisher rows out farther each year, chasing a vanishing catch while foreign trawlers feast on Philippine waters.

Every administration speaks of change. But each inherits the same system and protects the same interests. The laws are designed to protect property before people, debt before dignity, contracts before communities. Any threat to this arrangement—whether from labor, peasant movements, indigenous struggles, or civic dissent—is labeled destabilizing, and crushed or co-opted.

This is not merely dysfunction. It is by design.

The system is not broken because it fails to serve the people. It is broken because it was never meant to.

And until that truth is recognized, until that arrangement is dismantled—not reformed, not repackaged, but replaced—the Philippines will remain what it has long been: a nation rich in people, land, and potential, ruled by a cartel of power determined to keep it poor.


Corruption Is Not a Bug—It Is a Feature 

Each year, the Philippines does not stumble into poverty by accident. It is driven there by design.

Ordinary officials might steal; the system steals massively. Annually, up to 20% of the national budget is siphoned off through graft—equivalent to a staggering ₱800 billion or more per year, according to OMB data and investigations by transparency watchdogs. This is not “leakage.” It is planned robbery: funds meant for schools, clinics, hospitals, roads, and disaster relief are captured by cartels of contractors, brokers, and politicians. While teachers’ salaries stagnate, while rural roads remain unpaved, private jets ferry the grandchildren of power in Manila’s skies.

Meanwhile, farmers continue to labor on land that is not theirs. They cultivate genetically rich soils—but cannot claim them. Imports now account for nearly a quarter of rice consumption, thanks to liberal laws that favored big traders. From only 8% dependency a decade ago, rice imports leapt to 23% by 2024 (). Yet these same farmers receive rock-bottom farm-gate prices—often less than half what the consumer pays—leaving them trapped in debt and despair. 
  • In Metro Manila, the cost of living has soared beyond reach. As of late 2024: A daily minimum wage of ₱645 buys only half a ₱1,215 Family Living Wage. 
  • Food inflation—rice, vegetables, meat—rose by 3–6% in Manila alone, further outpacing stagnant wages. 
  • For a worker, a single meal of rice and meat could cost 11–15% of a day’s pay. 
Yet officials still peddle the lie of “inclusive growth”—as if rising GDP covers up families skipping meals. 

Rice costs peaked with annual spikes of 24%, prompting the government to declare a food-security emergency in early 2025, releasing massive buffer stocks to stem soaring prices of ₱42–₱57/kg—still far above pre-crisis levels . But while government drone-delivered rice may temporarily ease the pangs of hunger, the cough of economic injustice remains savage and unresolved. 

These are not empty statistics. They are passing helicopters, private jets, and the opulent privilege of those who live off the sweat of others. ₱800 billion lost annually is not a budgetary error—it is the price of national poverty. 

Farmers, despite feeding a nation, remain in want. Metro workers slave for food that takes more than half their day’s wage. 

The rich speak of inclusion as they hoard the spoils of theft. This is not a crisis of scarcity. It is crisis by choice. What grows richer every year is the crook in the system, and What stays poor every year is the people. 

 They call it inclusive growth; the people call it inclusive theft.


The Market Has Become a God—But It Does Not Feed the Hungry

They told the people to trust the market.

They said, let go of sovereignty, let go of public control, let go of the idea that the state owes you anything beyond slogans. In return, they promised prosperity—jobs, development, “inclusivity.”

Foreign investors would lift all boats.
Privatization would bring efficiency.
Deregulation would spark innovation.
And if the rich got richer, their fortunes would “trickle down.”

But the promises have rotted on the vine. And the people now see the truth.
  • Hospitals no longer ask who needs care. They ask who can pay. Health has become a commodity, not a right. A cancer diagnosis is a death sentence—not from the disease, but from poverty.
  • Water, the most basic human need, is no longer a public service. It is a product. Priced. Packaged. Rationed. Leaked away through aging pipes while the profits flow to conglomerates and foreign shareholders.
  • Land, once tilled by generations of farmers, is now seized for golf courses, malls, condominiums, and casinos. Peasants and indigenous communities are driven out, called “squatters” on their ancestral homes.
The market decides who eats and who starves.
Farmers grow food they cannot afford.
Fisherfolk sell their catch only to buy instant noodles.
Local harvests rot for lack of roads, warehouses, and fair buyers—while imported rice floods the market to favor the brokers and middlemen.

Prices rise not because of scarcity, but because of speculation.
People pay more not for better goods, but for the profits of those who own the supply chains.

This is not mismanagement.
This is looting—systemic, legal, and deliberate.

It is theft, wrapped in economic jargon.
Austerity, liberalization, foreign direct investment—these are not neutral policies. They are weapons. Tools in the hands of the elite to extract wealth from the people, to concentrate power in the few.

This is capitalism without conscience. Capitalism without country.

The Philippine state has abdicated its role as protector of the people.
It has outsourced its duties to corporations.
It has mortgaged its future to creditors.
It has chosen profit over public good, and told the poor to be patient—or blame themselves.

And yet, the people are not blind. They are beginning to name what was once unspeakable.
That this system, hailed as “development,” is in fact structured exclusion.
That “free market” means freedom for the powerful to exploit, and no freedom for the poor to live with dignity.
That what they were told was progress has become a prison.

To feed the hungry, to house the homeless, to heal the sick—we must dethrone the market as our god.
We must remember that the economy is meant to serve the people, not the other way around.

Until that day, no number of economic forecasts or glowing investor reports will hide the simple truth:
The market is booming.
But the people are breaking.


The People Endure, But They Remember 

The Filipino people are not helpless. They are not docile. They are not blind. 

They remember the promises made in every election. They remember the speeches of “public servants” who forget them the day after they win. They remember being told that if they worked hard, they could escape poverty—only to see the rules change and the doors close. 

They remember the land that was promised to them but never given. They remember the nurses and teachers who left their children behind to care for the children of strangers overseas. They remember the floods, the fires, the earthquakes—made worse not by nature, but by the unnatural corruption of those who failed to prepare. 


There Is Another Way 

The nation does not need pity. It needs power in the hands of the people.
  • Land must be returned to the tiller.
  • Labor must be protected by law, not left at the mercy of capital.
  • Public goods must remain public—health, housing, water, education.
  • The wealth of the nation must serve the many, not the few.
There are already seeds of this future: in the cooperatives that feed barrios, in the youth who organize after class, in the farmers who fight eviction with unity, in the workers who demand dignity and wage. 

The elite call these people dangerous.
History calls them necessary. 


A Reckoning Approaches 

The Philippines is not doomed to poverty. It is being held hostage by it.
The enemy is not ignorance. The enemy is organized greed. 

The elite will continue to pretend the system works. They will point to GDP growth, to stock markets, to shiny airports. 

But the masses know: you cannot eat GDP. You cannot live in a press release. 

One day soon, the people will rise—not with vengeance, but with clarity.
And they will say: this country belongs to us. Its riches are ours. Its future is ours.

The towers of the unjust may rise high, but they are built on the backs of the poor. And when the poor stand up, those towers will shake.