The Recycled State: SONA 2026 and the Political Economy of Permanent Reassurance

The Recycled State: SONA 2026 and the Political Economy of Permanent Reassurance

By the time President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. entered the session hall to deliver his fifth State of the Nation Address, the public already knew the general shape of the performance. There would be a scandal to condemn, an external crisis to explain, subsidies and completed projects to enumerate, foreign investments to celebrate, and a final invocation of unity, sovereignty, and hope. There would be selected statistics suggesting movement, selected beneficiaries representing compassion, and selected prosecutions presented as proof that the government had rediscovered accountability.

The names, acronyms, technologies, and political targets might change, but the underlying structure would remain familiar. This has been the durable language of Philippine presidential government: the country is always recovering from a crisis, correcting the mistakes of unnamed predecessors, entering a new phase of modernization, and standing on the threshold of a prosperity that somehow never becomes the ordinary experience of its people.

The 2026 SONA was therefore not remarkable because it contained nothing. It contained almost everything: flood-control prosecutions, recovered assets, rice distributions, fuel subsidies, fare discounts, tax relief, housing loans, agricultural machinery, health benefits, artificial-intelligence training, electric vehicles, hydrogen, nuclear energy, free-trade agreements, investment corridors, Pax Silica, a spaceport, ASEAN cooperation, and the defense of the West Philippine Sea.

What it lacked was not activity but an organizing economic purpose beyond the continued management of the existing order.

The speech resembled an enormous administrative catalogue. One program followed another, each offering temporary relief or the possibility of future improvement, while the fundamental relations among landowners, contractors, banks, utility companies, importers, foreign investors, political dynasties, and working people remained largely beyond examination. The government demonstrated that it was capable of administering consequences. It did not demonstrate that it intended to transform causes.

The masses appeared repeatedly, but mainly as recipients. They were drivers receiving fuel assistance, consumers receiving discounts, borrowers receiving moratoria, farmers receiving machinery, students receiving devices, and patients receiving benefit packages. They seldom appeared as organized producers, workers possessing bargaining power, farmers demanding effective control over land, communities determining the use of natural resources, or citizens entitled to shape an independent national development policy.

The SONA was addressed to the people, but the economic system it described was not built around their power. This explains the sense of distance that surrounded the address even when it discussed the most immediate burdens of ordinary households. The speech spoke of their hunger, indebtedness, transportation costs, electricity bills, illnesses, and insecure employment. Yet the underlying political economy remained organized around the requirements of contractors, utilities, financial institutions, real-estate developers, importers, large conglomerates, foreign capital, and competing political families.

The people were offered protection from the worst effects of the arrangement. They were not offered control over it.

The annual liturgy of concern

The President opened the SONA with the flood-control scandal, using the investigation to establish the moral authority of the rest of the address. He reported that contractors, senior officials, and legislators had already been charged or imprisoned; that the Ombudsman was preparing additional cases; and that nearly ₱25 billion in assets had been recovered, frozen, or preserved, with more than ₱800 million returned to the Treasury.

He then declared: “I am not the President of my family. I am not the President of my friends. I am the President of the Philippines, and my duty is to you, my fellow Filipinos.”

The statement was politically effective because it addressed the most persistent suspicion surrounding Philippine government: that public office is administered through family loyalty, friendship, political debt, and personal obligation.

Yet the emotional force of the declaration also revealed the limitation of the reform being proposed. A republic cannot depend upon the President’s willingness to rise above family and friendship. The purpose of institutions is precisely to ensure that public accountability does not depend upon the character, conscience, convenience, or political calculation of a particular ruler.

A government that prosecutes a relative may demonstrate resolve. A government that reforms campaign finance, political dynasties, beneficial-ownership disclosure, legislative budget insertions, procurement, bank secrecy, party-list representation, whistleblower protection, and the discretionary distribution of infrastructure funds would demonstrate that it understands the structure from which the scandal emerged.

The SONA concentrated upon the visible participants in corruption while remaining less forthcoming about the institutions that join contractors, legislators, public-works officials, local dynasties, campaign financiers, and private corporations into durable networks of accumulation.

The administration cited its Transparency Portal, an “Integrity Chain,” market-price comparisons, project reviews, and partnerships with civil-society organizations as safeguards against future abuse. These may improve monitoring, but portals do not prevent collusion, published prices do not necessarily reveal bid-rigging, and civil-society observation cannot substitute for professional procurement services, independent prosecution, open contracting data, enforceable conflict-of-interest rules, and effective protection for witnesses.

The Makati Business Club, approaching the address from a conventional business-reform perspective rather than from the political left, similarly noted the absence of several institutional measures: a Right to Information Act, transparency in bicameral budget negotiations, limits upon unprogrammed and discretionary funds, bank-secrecy reform, and structural safeguards against abusive tax audits. It also warned that cash-assistance programs could reinforce dependency and political patronage when they substitute for long-term reforms.

The administrative mechanisms announced by the President are useful. The mistake is to present them as sufficient.

Corruption is not only the theft of money after a project has been approved. It begins in the power to decide which project will exist, where it will be built, how its cost will be calculated, which contractor will receive it, which legislator will sponsor it, and which political figure will claim credit for it. Patronage is embedded in allocation before it becomes visible as a kickback.

IBON Foundation has argued that the flood-control controversy must be understood through the broader use of the national budget for political consolidation and patronage. It cited the enormous expansion of unprogrammed appropriations during the early years of the Marcos administration and argued that control over bureaucracy and public expenditure enables political factions to reward allies, cultivate local machines, and strengthen themselves against rivals. IBON is an advocacy research institution with an explicit political position, but the institutional issue it raises is not easily dismissed: corruption does not begin only when cash changes hands; it also operates through the politically determined architecture of the budget.

The scandal is therefore not merely a story of dishonest engineers, contractors, or legislators. It concerns the use of appropriations, congressional influence, local political networks, private corporations, and executive discretion to transfer wealth upward while communities remain exposed to flooding.

The state constructs infrastructure, but political patrons construct the conditions under which infrastructure becomes private income.

The relationship recalls Paul Hutchcroft’s concept of “booty capitalism,” in which access to state authority becomes a principal means of private accumulation. The institutional form has modernized since the period Hutchcroft examined. Patronage now coexists with digital procurement, transparency portals, public-private partnerships, economic zones, and the language of good governance. But the persistence of contractor-politicians, dynastic control, discretionary appropriations, and oligarchic influence suggests that the underlying relationship has not disappeared.

The President’s declaration that he serves neither family nor friends was therefore a proper moral statement but an inadequate theory of reform. The question is not whether one Marcos can prosecute another. The question is whether the state can be reorganized so that no Marcos, Duterte, Romualdez, Cayetano, Co, or allied contractor possesses privileged access to public money in the first place.

Relief presented as transformation

The central economic theme of the address was organized around the government’s response to war in the Middle East and the resulting shocks to fuel, food, transportation, electricity, and overseas employment. The administration declared a state of national energy emergency, ordered agencies to economize, redirected funds toward social assistance, and transferred nearly ₱58 billion in additional resources to local governments. The slogan chosen for the response was “UPLIFT.”

The President then listed the emergency measures: diversification of oil supplies, fuel-price rollbacks, temporary suspension of excise taxes on kerosene and liquefied petroleum gas, limits upon rice-price increases, loan-payment extensions, lower digital transaction fees, rice distributions, electricity-bill installment plans, temporary restrictions upon disconnections, transport subsidies, fare discounts, free rides, service contracting, emergency employment, and assistance for overseas Filipino workers.

These interventions have real value. A family receiving rice, a driver receiving fuel support, or a household protected temporarily from electricity disconnection experiences a genuine if limited benefit. When a sudden price shock threatens food, transportation, or electricity access, the state has a duty to intervene.

The error lies not in providing relief but in confusing relief with development.

Emergency assistance addresses the consequences of an economic structure after those consequences reach the household. Structural policy changes the institutions that repeatedly expose the household to crisis. The SONA described an energetic government responding to injury. It did not offer an equally persuasive strategy for preventing the injury from recurring.

The economic conditions surrounding the speech made the distinction unavoidable. Philippine gross domestic product expanded by only 2.8 percent in the first quarter of 2026. Services grew by 4.5 percent, while agriculture, forestry, and fisheries contracted by 0.2 percent. The principal contributors to growth included wholesale and retail trade, financial and insurance activities, and public administration. The figures described an economy still capable of circulation and consumption but much less successful in expanding the agricultural and industrial foundations of productive capacity.

Headline inflation remained at 6.4 percent in June, after reaching 6.8 percent in May. The decline from one month to the next did not mean that prices had returned to previous levels; it meant only that they were rising at a somewhat slower rate.

IBON’s pre-SONA assessment was considerably harsher. It described an administration committed to a market-driven framework that favors large business interests while ordinary families absorb high prices, insecure employment, and deepening poverty. IBON Executive Director Sonny Africa argued that the prevailing path generates wealth for a few at the cost of joblessness and hardship for the majority.

IBON’s interpretation is openly critical and should be read as such. Yet the official data do not render its argument irrelevant. Weak agricultural growth, fragile industrial performance, falling year-on-year employment, high inflation, and millions of underemployed workers are matters of public record. IBON’s contribution is to connect these indicators to the structure of production rather than treating each as an isolated technical problem.

This is where the SONA remained conventional. The state promised to soften the price shock, facilitate credit, subsidize selected consumers, expand targeted social protection, and encourage individuals to adjust. Households were told to conserve, save, insure themselves, use digital platforms, and become more financially literate. Workers were told to reskill. Farmers were encouraged to mechanize and consolidate. Drivers were expected to modernize. Small enterprises were expected to formalize and digitalize.

The individual must become more resilient. The economic structure is not required to become less exploitative.

Neoliberalism should not be confused with the simple disappearance of the state. In dependent economies, it often produces an active state: one that protects markets, guarantees investments, builds commercially useful infrastructure, rescues strategic firms, disciplines labor, and distributes narrowly targeted assistance to those displaced or impoverished by the resulting system.

The state does not withdraw. It becomes a repair shop for the social damage caused by the market order it continues to preserve.

This is why the SONA could contain a remarkable number of subsidies, discounts, and social programs without departing from neoliberal policy. Social assistance can coexist with privatization, deregulation, trade liberalization, labor flexibility, investment enclaves, and the commodification of essential services. Relief makes the system politically survivable. It does not necessarily make it economically just.

The administration distributed assistance without redistributing power.

The cost of living and the privatization of adjustment

The official narrative treated the increase in prices largely as a consequence of war abroad, expensive oil, disrupted shipping, and a weakening peso. These were important factors. But external shocks become domestic crises through an existing economic structure.

Dependence upon imported petroleum, imported agricultural inputs, imported machinery, and foreign exchange magnifies international price movements. Weak public transportation forces households to absorb higher fuel prices through fares and commodity costs. A fragmented and privately organized electricity system passes expenses through generators, transmission operators, distributors, taxes, and regulatory charges. Low wages leave families with almost no margin against even a temporary increase.

IBON reported that the nationwide price of regular-milled rice rose from approximately ₱42 per kilogram in June 2025 to ₱50 in June 2026. It also cited increases in the prices of several vegetables and fish, a sharp rise in the cost of an 11-kilogram LPG cylinder in Metro Manila, and an increase in electricity rates from ₱12.16 to ₱14.48 per kilowatt-hour. For a household consuming 200 kilowatt-hours, that electricity increase amounted to roughly ₱466 per month.

The government’s temporary suspension of selected taxes, installment plans, transport discounts, fuel subsidies, and rice distributions may mitigate the immediate effects. They do not explain why the country remains so vulnerable after decades of promises concerning energy independence, food security, efficient logistics, and inclusive growth.

The President later announced that the government’s mission would move beyond “UPLIFT” toward “SECURITY and SELF-SUFFICIENCY.” The shift in vocabulary was significant. But self-sufficiency cannot mean merely finding more countries from which to import oil during a crisis.

A country does not become energy secure because it can purchase petroleum from Japan, South Korea, Oman, India, Russia, or China when one source or route is threatened. It becomes more secure when it reduces the quantity of imported energy required to transport people, manufacture goods, produce food, and maintain households.

Likewise, food security is not achieved merely by opening emergency rice reserves, lowering import tariffs, imposing temporary price limits, or distributing sacks of rice. It requires secure land tenure, irrigation, domestic seed and fertilizer capacity, storage, processing, public procurement, transportation, producer cooperatives, fair farm-gate prices, and protection from import policies that sacrifice farmers whenever urban prices become politically inconvenient.

The administration’s policies continue to ask the population to adapt to recurring scarcity. Consumers are told to conserve. Workers are told to acquire new skills. Farmers are told to adopt new technology. Drivers are told to purchase modern vehicles. Households are told to install solar panels. Small businesses are told to digitize.

Those with capital may adjust. Those without it remain dependent upon temporary aid. Adaptation becomes a private responsibility while structural vulnerability remains public policy.

When the wage is only a fraction of life

The most revealing contrast between the SONA and popular experience lies in the relationship between wages and the cost of living. The President discussed rice assistance, fare discounts, income-tax exemptions, loan moratoria, insurance, and social-security contributions. He did not place a substantial wage increase at the center of the government’s response.

IBON estimated that the national family living wage for a household of five had reached approximately ₱1,312 per day by June 2026. Its family living wage is not the government’s official poverty threshold. It is an advocacy estimate of the income needed for a decent standard of living rather than bare statistical subsistence. Business organizations and government agencies may contest its assumptions. But the estimate dramatizes a real and widely experienced gap between legal wage floors and household needs.

IBON also estimated the nationwide average nominal minimum wage at about ₱512 per day and its inflation-adjusted value at only ₱378. On those estimates, the average minimum wage covered far less than half the income required for a family of five to live decently.

Under such conditions, temporary discounts are not an income policy. A discount reduces one bill for a limited period while leaving the worker’s bargaining position unchanged. A rice distribution can alleviate hunger but does not provide a wage sufficient to purchase rice regularly. A fuel subsidy may help a driver survive a crisis but does not establish a remunerative public-transport system.

The proposed expansion of the personal income-tax exemption to employees earning no more than ₱350,000 annually may benefit sections of the formal lower-middle and middle classes. The proposal to exempt small enterprises from the minimum corporate income tax may likewise assist businesses facing weak demand.

But a worker already earning below the taxable threshold does not benefit from being exempted from a tax that the worker was not paying. A person in informal employment may receive no direct relief at all.

Tax relief is not necessarily unjust, but neither is it automatically progressive. Its beneficiaries must be identified, its revenue cost calculated, and its effects compared with alternatives: a legislated wage increase, stronger collective bargaining, enforcement of labor standards, lower indirect taxes on necessities, universal social services, or income transfers based on household need rather than formal tax status.

The government’s preferred response is to increase resilience rather than bargaining power. Workers are encouraged to contribute to the Social Security System, obtain insurance, open digital accounts, save, and prepare for retirement. These are prudent practices for households capable of maintaining them. Financial literacy, however, cannot compensate for insufficient income. A family cannot budget its way out of a wage that does not cover the cost of life.

The neoliberal moral of personal responsibility appears subtly in such appeals. The worker must prepare for illness, unemployment, retirement, and inflation through private discipline. Structural insecurity is recoded as inadequate personal planning. The person unable to save is encouraged to become more responsible, even when the inability to save is the direct consequence of low wages, unstable employment, high rent, and expensive utilities.

Bread, in this setting, is not simply a commodity to be subsidized. It is the economic right to an income sufficient for life. Until wages become central rather than supplementary to social policy, the government will continue to distribute relief for a poverty that its labor and industrial policies reproduce.

Employment without occupations

The administration emphasized job fairs, advertised vacancies, hired-on-the-spot applicants, emergency employment, livelihood programs, technical and vocational training, senior-high-school employability, and artificial-intelligence readiness. It reported nearly 300,000 advertised jobs during Labor Day fairs and more than 6,000 immediate hires, alongside temporary income support under TUPAD and related programs.

These numbers demonstrate administrative activity but reveal little about the quality of employment. A vacancy advertised at a job fair is not necessarily a new job created by government policy. A person hired on the spot may obtain employment, but the statistic does not disclose the wage, contractual status, working conditions, duration, social protection, or possibility of advancement.

The May 2026 Labor Force Survey estimated 2.50 million unemployed Filipinos, compared with 2.03 million a year earlier. Total employment fell from 50.29 million in May 2025 to 49.63 million in May 2026. Approximately 6.04 million employed persons were underemployed, meaning that they wanted additional hours, another job, or a different position offering more work. Services accounted for 61.8 percent of employment, while agriculture and industry represented only 19.9 and 18.3 percent, respectively.

The economy can therefore report a high employment rate while millions survive through insecure, intermittent, poorly paid, or self-created work. The distinction between having performed some work during the survey period and possessing a stable occupation is essential.

An occupation allows a worker to accumulate skill, seniority, social protection, bargaining power, and predictable income. Much of the employment celebrated in official discourse provides activity without security.

IBON argues that the labor market is considerably weaker than the headline unemployment rate suggests. Its broader estimates include millions in informal or insecure arrangements and point to discouraged people classified as outside the labor force. These are not the official unemployment definitions and should not be presented as such. But they expose the danger of treating any recorded work, however brief or precarious, as evidence of a healthy employment system.

This is why the fashionable emphasis on “reskilling” and “upskilling” can become evasive. Training is valuable when linked to a national program of production. It becomes an adjustment mechanism when workers are repeatedly instructed to acquire new qualifications for jobs that the economy does not create in sufficient quantity.

A rational skills strategy would begin with an industrial map. The country would determine which capabilities it intends to possess: agricultural machinery, railway equipment, shipbuilding, medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, electronics design, semiconductor fabrication, batteries, renewable-energy equipment, machine tools, food processing, and public digital infrastructure.

The state would then coordinate universities, technical institutes, public procurement, research institutions, development banks, industrial credit, and investment policy around those capacities.

The SONA largely reversed this sequence. It offered training first and assumed that the market would eventually provide an appropriate use for the trained worker. The individual is required to prepare for an economy whose direction is determined elsewhere.

Education becomes the production of adaptable labor rather than the construction of collective national capability.

The result is a familiar contradiction. Filipino workers are praised as globally competitive precisely because the domestic economy cannot absorb them productively. Their skill becomes an export commodity. Their departure for foreign employment is treated as proof of employability rather than evidence of the weakness of domestic production.

The old demand for bread is therefore not merely a demand for food assistance. It is a demand for wages sufficient to purchase food, secure occupations through which households can plan their futures, and a productive economy that does not treat labor export as one of its most dependable sources of foreign exchange.

Agriculture without agrarian power

The SONA claimed that agricultural production had been strengthening since 2023, citing irrigation, mechanization, processing systems, cold storage, crop insurance, coconut planting, National Food Authority procurement, land-title distribution, and the cancellation of agrarian-reform debts.

Many of these measures are useful. Debt cancellation can free agrarian-reform beneficiaries from obligations they should never have carried indefinitely. Titles can provide legal security to families that waited decades for formal recognition. Irrigation, storage, processing, insurance, and machinery can improve production when designed around the actual circumstances of farmers and fishing communities.

The official data nevertheless complicate the celebratory narrative. The value of agricultural and fisheries production declined by 0.3 percent in the first quarter of 2026. Crop production fell by 2.4 percent and fisheries by 6.1 percent.

Measured by volume, crop production declined by 4.6 percent. Sugarcane output fell by 8 percent, palay by 6.3 percent, and corn by 5.5 percent. Fisheries production fell by 15.3 percent from the same period a year earlier.

These results do not mean that every program cited by the President was fictional. They demonstrate that distributing inputs is not the same as achieving structural transformation.

Forty thousand machines do not automatically produce agricultural progress. Machinery may be inappropriate to farm size, unavailable when needed, poorly maintained, or dependent upon imported fuel and replacement parts. Irrigation infrastructure may exist without reliable water. Cold-storage facilities may be too distant from producers or controlled by private intermediaries. Insurance may be difficult to claim. Titles may be distributed without affordable credit, extension services, cooperative organization, or bargaining power.

Food security cannot be reduced to the physical quantity of output. It encompasses land tenure, producer income, credit, storage, processing, transportation, market power, public procurement, import timing, and the distribution of risk among farmers, traders, consumers, and the government.

The country uses imports to restrain consumer prices but often does so without a sufficiently strong long-term program to improve domestic productivity and farmer income. Cheap imports may temporarily benefit urban consumers while lowering farm-gate prices, discouraging local production, and increasing dependence upon the next round of imports.

The administration’s low-priced rice program illustrates the contradiction. Consumers understandably welcome cheaper rice. But when low retail prices are sustained through imports produced under conditions unavailable to Filipino farmers, the policy may assist one class of poor citizens by impoverishing another.

Food security requires a deliberate balance between consumer affordability and producer viability. It demands land reform, public procurement, buffer stocks, irrigation, research, extension, rural credit, domestic production of inputs, storage, processing, transportation, and protection against destructive import surges.

It cannot mean permanent protection for inefficient intermediaries. Neither can it mean permanent dependence upon the world market.

The promise to plant 100 million coconut trees demonstrates the same problem of treating a physical target as an industry. A coconut industry requires nurseries, disease-resistant varieties, scientific breeding, processing plants, product laboratories, quality standards, domestic brands, financing, and producer participation in high-value goods such as food ingredients, fibers, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and engineered materials.

Without these institutions, the country may simply produce more raw or semi-processed material for firms that capture the greater value elsewhere.

Agrarian reform is likewise more than the distribution of documents. A farmer may possess a title while remaining dependent upon traders, landlords, lenders, processors, input suppliers, importers, and land developers. A formally titled but economically unviable farm can eventually be leased, mortgaged, fragmented, or reconcentrated.

The demand for land is therefore a demand for power over agricultural production. It means that those who cultivate the soil possess not only paper ownership but effective access to water, credit, technology, markets, processing, and political representation.

The SONA discussed agrarian beneficiaries. It did not confront agrarian power.

Electricity and the illusion of removing a charge

The President’s demand for amendment of the Electric Power Industry Reform Act and the prohibition of system-loss charges against consumers produced one of the strongest responses during the address. He said: “It is not the consumer’s fault that system losses occurred. It is therefore wrong to make consumers pay for them.”

He then shifted from requesting to demanding the immediate amendment of EPIRA, including removal of the value-added tax imposed upon system-loss charges.

The consumer’s grievance is legitimate. Households did not design the transmission and distribution system, negotiate power-supply agreements, determine generation investments, or select the structure of the electricity market. It is reasonable to require utilities and shareholders to bear losses caused by inefficient management, deficient maintenance, theft, poor metering, or inadequate investment.

Yet removing a line item from the bill does not make its underlying cost disappear. Technical losses occur in every electricity system. The relevant regulatory question is which losses are unavoidable, which arise from inefficiency, and who should absorb each category.

Without structural reform, the cost may simply return through another charge, a higher distribution rate, reduced investment, or a public subsidy.

IBON’s critique extends beyond system loss. It argues that 25 years of EPIRA shifted electricity away from the principle of public service and toward the revenue requirements of private generators, distributors, and traders. It describes Philippine electricity as possibly the most expensive in the region and argues that a small number of energy conglomerates have benefited from the privatized structure.

The precise regional ranking can vary according to exchange rates, subsidies, consumer categories, and the period measured. But the underlying burden is not in serious dispute: Philippine electricity is expensive relative to household income and poses a major obstacle to both social welfare and industrial production.

Electricity is not an ordinary commodity. It is an essential household service, an input into agriculture, and the foundation of industrialization. A system that produces high returns for private capital while imposing heavy costs upon households and domestic manufacturers weakens national development.

The proposed Sariling Kuryente Act, intended to make rooftop solar and battery systems easier to install, may assist some consumers. But it also illustrates the inequality of market-based escape. Households with sufficient capital or credit can purchase partial independence from the grid. Those without savings remain captive consumers.

A collective infrastructure problem is converted into an individual investment opportunity.

A developmental energy policy would ask not merely how Filipino households can purchase solar panels but how Filipino industries can manufacture panels, batteries, inverters, transformers, turbines, meters, and storage systems. It would connect public generation, grid development, renewable energy, industrial electricity rates, research, and domestic equipment manufacturing.

The SONA also promoted energy storage, natural-gas exploration, hydrogen, and renewed consideration of nuclear power. These technologies deserve serious evaluation. Nuclear energy in particular cannot be treated as an applause line. Any proposal must account for construction costs, financing risk, waste management, emergency planning, insurance, regulation, decommissioning, grid requirements, and the danger that delays or overruns will be transferred to the public.

The willingness to reopen EPIRA is welcome. Reform, however, should not be confined to removing one politically unpopular charge. It must examine market concentration, cross-ownership, long-term supply contracts, transmission bottlenecks, stranded costs, reserve requirements, regulatory capacity, public ownership, and the distribution of risks between consumers and shareholders.

Electricity is too important to be left entirely to the logic of private revenue.

Public service, private profit

The same conflict appears in transportation, water, housing, health, and education. The SONA praised service contracting, fare discounts, free rides, rail projects, public-vehicle modernization, toll reductions, port and airport fee relief, housing finance, and private-sector participation in classroom construction.

Each measure was presented as a technical response to a specific problem. The larger tendency was not examined: essential public services are increasingly treated as fields for private investment.

Transport, labor, consumer, and human-rights groups participating in an IBON-hosted forum summarized the tendency as “public service, private profit.” They raised the privatization of airport operations, toll increases, transport-network vehicle conditions, public-vehicle modernization, possible privatization of MRT-3, and infrastructure projects that threaten communities and livelihoods. Their proposed alternative was a mass-transport system that is accessible, affordable, safe, and publicly accountable rather than principally organized as a commercial opportunity.

The issue is not that private capital can never participate in infrastructure. The issue is the routine assumption that private provision is inherently more efficient and that public obligations can be fulfilled through commercially attractive contracts.

A private concessionaire must recover costs, service debt, satisfy shareholders, and produce profit. Unless the contract and regulator are unusually strong, these requirements are transferred to users through fares, tolls, fees, land development, guaranteed payments, or public subsidies.

Public-private partnerships may privatize decision-making and revenue while preserving public liability. The government supplies land, guarantees demand, finances connecting infrastructure, relocates communities, or absorbs political risk. The concessionaire receives a long-term revenue stream. The transaction is then described as development because a physical facility has been constructed.

The same principle applies to the SONA’s announcement that private partners would construct an initial 16,000 classrooms. The important questions include not only the number of rooms but also the financing structure, repayment obligations, maintenance arrangements, land use, procurement process, and long-term cost to the education budget.

A classroom is a public necessity. The means by which it is financed determine whether it becomes a durable social asset or another contractual revenue stream.

The neoliberal state is not merely a small state. It is a state that defines more areas of social life as opportunities for investment while using public resources to make those opportunities profitable.

Education: devices without mastery

The education portion of the SONA contained many defensible commitments: school feeding, counselor associates, teacher promotions, additional positions, classrooms, technical and vocational programs, scholarships, devices, digital connectivity, and artificial-intelligence literacy.

The danger is that the government continues to describe the education crisis through inputs and participation rather than learning.

A laptop is not literacy. A smart television is not mathematical competence. An artificial-intelligence seminar is not critical thinking. A university ranking is not proof that the average Filipino child can read an age-appropriate text.

The World Bank reported in April 2026 that 91 percent of Filipino ten-year-olds could not read and understand an age-appropriate passage, a condition described as learning poverty. It approved a $600 million project aimed at improving foundational literacy, numeracy, and mathematics for more than 21 million students and approximately 770,000 teachers.

In such circumstances, the first technology policy is still reading. The first artificial-intelligence policy is the capacity to distinguish evidence from assertion. The first innovation policy is a teacher with adequate preparation, manageable class sizes, appropriate materials, and sufficient time to teach.

The SONA should have established a limited number of measurable national learning obligations for the remaining years of the administration: the proportion of Grade 3 pupils reading at grade level, reductions in classroom congestion, teacher mastery of subject matter, remediation for learners promoted without minimum competence, and improvements in attendance and nutrition.

Devices and training participants can be counted immediately. Learning must be measured over time, and its results may be politically uncomfortable. That is precisely why it is the more important measure.

Health coverage without full financial protection

The President also reported the expansion of PhilHealth benefits, medicine programs, zero-balance billing, medical assistance, accredited providers, and treatment packages for cancer, heart disease, HIV, tuberculosis, and developmental disabilities.

These programs can materially reduce suffering. But enrollment and benefit expansion must be distinguished from genuine financial protection.

A person may be enrolled in PhilHealth yet continue to pay for medicines, diagnostic procedures, transportation, professional fees, or services unavailable in a public facility. A zero-balance policy in selected wards does not necessarily eliminate expenses incurred before admission, after discharge, or outside participating hospitals.

The government should therefore report not only how many families used PhilHealth or obtained zero-balance billing, but how much household out-of-pocket spending actually declined, how frequently claims were denied or remained incomplete, how long patients waited, whether medicines were available, and how access differed among regions.

Medical assistance should also be transformed from an act of discretionary political benevolence into an enforceable social right. The move toward electronic applications and fewer documentary requirements is welcome. The ultimate objective should be to make endorsements and guarantee letters unnecessary because the health system itself finances medically necessary treatment.

Pax Silica and the modernization of the enclave

The most revealing industrial promise in the SONA was Pax Silica. The President described the proposed industrial hub as an advanced manufacturing and logistics center with artificial intelligence at its core. It would supposedly create quality employment, strengthen industrial competitiveness, and place the Philippines within the global technology value chain.

The vocabulary was futuristic, but the economic model was familiar. The Philippines would provide strategic location, land, labor, infrastructure, energy, minerals, tax incentives, and access to regional markets. Foreign firms would provide capital, technology, and participation in international production networks. The government would call the resulting arrangement industrialization.

IBON’s analysis asks whether Pax Silica represents genuine industrial development or a higher-technology version of the export-processing enclave. The Philippines has offered approximately 1,620 hectares in New Clark City as a location for foreign-owned, artificial-intelligence-enabled firms. The wider initiative has been promoted with claims involving substantial foreign assistance, critical-mineral development, enormous private investment, and up to one million jobs under the Luzon Economic Corridor.

These possibilities are not impossible. They are not self-executing. Investment commitments are not the same as capital actually spent. Construction employment is not the same as permanent industrial occupation. A technologically advanced export facility is not automatically a nationally rooted industry. The presence of sophisticated equipment does not mean that domestic firms possess the technology.

The Makati Business Club identified similar omissions from a different ideological direction. It noted that the administration failed to distinguish facilitated investment commitments from actual capital inflows, that net foreign direct investment had declined during the first four months of 2026, and that the SONA offered no concrete Pax Silica roadmap covering governance, power, infrastructure, investors, skills, local supply chains, and safeguards. It also asked how the project would differ from conventional Philippine Economic Zone Authority enclaves and how domestic value added would be increased.

This convergence is significant. IBON approaches the issue from a nationalist and anti-imperialist perspective. The Makati Business Club approaches it from the standpoint of business feasibility, governance, and competitiveness. Both identify the absence of a clear mechanism connecting foreign investment to domestic industrial capability.

The history of Philippine electronics manufacturing provides reason for caution. The country has participated in semiconductor assembly and related industries for decades. Electronics remain a major export category. Yet domestic ownership, design capacity, machinery production, and technological control remain limited. Foreign firms can expand, automate, relocate, merge, or close according to corporate strategies formulated elsewhere.

The product may be technologically advanced while the host economy remains technologically dependent.

IBON has pointed to Intel’s departure and the collapse of Hanjin Heavy Industries in Subic as examples of the vulnerability created by dependence upon foreign corporate decisions. It also argues that technology transfer and worker training take place primarily according to the profitability requirements of foreign firms rather than according to a Philippine industrial plan.

The central issue is not whether foreign capital is inherently undesirable. A developmental state can use foreign investment to obtain machinery, skills, export access, and technology. But this requires conditions: local-content schedules, domestic supplier programs, technology-transfer obligations, Filipino engineering and management targets, worker training, public research partnerships, environmental safeguards, taxation, labor rights, and the development of nationally owned competitors.

Without such disciplines, Pax Silica may produce sophisticated facilities while preserving an underdeveloped national economy around them. The enclave will import machinery, use Philippine land and electricity, employ Filipino labor, process materials for international clients, and export the resulting products. The value chain will be global, but Filipino participation may remain concentrated in its least powerful segments.

The proposed movement from raw mineral exports to domestic processing is desirable only if processing enlarges domestic capability and social benefit. A foreign-controlled facility that consumes Philippine water, electricity, land, and minerals to produce goods for foreign markets may be more technically elaborate than direct extraction. But the decisive questions remain: who controls production, who receives the profits, who bears the ecological cost, and what productive knowledge remains in the country?

This is why the issue cannot be reduced to China versus the United States. Supporters of Pax Silica may argue that a United States-led semiconductor and artificial-intelligence network is preferable to Chinese purchase of raw Philippine nickel and copper. Yet replacing a China-centered chain with a United States-centered chain does not automatically produce Philippine industrial sovereignty.

The relevant comparison is not China against the United States. It is dependency against development.

Pax Silica could contribute to industrialization if the state imposes a national program upon it. Without such a program, it will place artificial intelligence, semiconductors, critical minerals, and geopolitical language around the old export-processing model.

Resource extraction remains resource extraction even when the mineral passes through an attractive factory before leaving the country. Export processing remains export processing even when the product is called artificial intelligence.

Investment commitments and the accounting of aspiration

The President stated that more than ₱6 trillion in projects had been facilitated through the government’s Green Lane system and that these investments were expected to generate more than 400,000 jobs.

The magnitude of the figure produced the intended impression. But a facilitated investment is not necessarily an operating factory.

According to the Board of Investments, 244 projects worth approximately ₱6.43 trillion had received Green Lane certification as of March 2026. Yet 171 projects worth ₱5.79 trillion remained in pre-development.

This does not mean that the projects are fictitious. Large investments require permitting, financing, construction, and coordination. But proposed, approved, certified, financed, under-construction, operational, and fully productive projects are different categories.

A businesslike report should distinguish them. The relevant questions are how much capital has actually entered the country, how much has been spent, how many permanent jobs have been created, what wages are being paid, what proportion of equipment and inputs is supplied locally, how much tax expenditure has been granted, and what amount of technology and profit remains in the Philippines.

The SONA treated the pipeline as development. This resembles the older practice of presenting loan packages, project costs, and investment pledges as though the amount passing through the project were itself a measure of success. Development cannot be judged solely by the magnitude of money announced. It must be assessed according to the productive capabilities, incomes, institutions, and public assets remaining after the expenditure.

The upper-middle-income illusion

The administration has also celebrated the Philippines’ statistical classification as an upper-middle-income economy. The World Bank category is based on average gross national income per capita and is a legitimate tool for international comparison. It does not describe how income is distributed, whether employment is secure, or whether ordinary families can afford food, housing, utilities, education, and health care.

IBON argues that the label conceals the contradiction between aggregate income and mass hardship. It cited Social Weather Stations data indicating an increase in self-rated poor families from 12.2 million in June 2022 to approximately 14.5 million in March 2026. It also noted that manufacturing had fallen to 17.4 percent of GDP in 2025 and agriculture to 7.9 percent, historically low shares reflecting the weakness of domestic production.

Self-rated poverty is not the same as the official poverty-incidence measure, and the distinction should be preserved. But self-rated poverty captures insecurity that average national income can obscure.

The country may cross an international income threshold while millions remain in informal work, wages lag behind living costs, public services remain inadequate, and domestic productive sectors continue to weaken.

The distinction is not an argument against growth. It is an argument about the composition and distribution of growth. An economy can expand through trade, real estate, finance, privatized utilities, remittances, business-process outsourcing, and foreign-controlled enclaves without constructing the agricultural and industrial base required for broad, secure, and sovereign development.

The government measures progress through average national income. The household measures it through the price of rice, electricity, transportation, rent, medicine, and schooling.

Both measurements are real. Only one determines whether a family eats adequately at the end of the month.

Tax relief, debt, and temporary generosity

The SONA proposed raising the personal income-tax exemption, reducing other income-tax liabilities, removing the minimum corporate income tax for small firms, and granting amnesty for several forms of unpaid taxes and penalties. These measures may support consumption and offer relief to formal enterprises. But the fiscal explanation was incomplete.

Permanent services require permanent revenue. Recovered corruption proceeds cannot finance recurring obligations indefinitely.

The administration repeatedly linked funds recovered or saved from flood-control corruption to education, food, health, PhilHealth, and medical assistance. The redirection of stolen or improperly allocated money is proper. It is not a sustainable fiscal system.

Schools, hospitals, pensions, public transport, and food programs require predictable annual revenue. Recovered assets are uncertain and nonrecurring.

Tax amnesties also raise questions of equity. An amnesty may encourage delinquent taxpayers to return to the system and may clear accounts that are otherwise difficult to collect. Repeated amnesties, however, can teach taxpayers that delay will eventually be forgiven. The salaried worker whose taxes are withheld automatically receives no comparable opportunity to withhold payment until a future settlement.

A progressive fiscal strategy would place greater weight upon concentrated wealth, inherited assets, property gains, monopoly profits, luxury consumption, speculative transactions, extractive rents, and the enormous value transferred through fiscal incentives and public-private partnership guarantees.

IBON’s criticism of the 2026 budget is that, despite the political theater surrounding supposed restraint and reform, the fiscal structure remained oriented toward patronage, political survival, debt service, and consumption-led growth rather than sustained investment in domestic agriculture, Filipino industry, and universal public services.

Its wording is polemical. The absence of a coherent industrial transformation program in the SONA gives the criticism weight.

Sovereignty at sea, dependency on land

The closing foreign-policy passages were among the strongest portions of the speech. The President reaffirmed the 2016 arbitral award, promised to defend it through peaceful and legal means, and honored the Armed Forces, Coast Guard, and fisherfolk who maintain the country’s maritime presence.

The defense of maritime rights is necessary. But sovereignty cannot be limited to maps, patrols, legal awards, and diplomatic declarations. It must extend to economic life.

A country is not fully sovereign when foreign powers determine the direction of its most advanced industries. It is not food-sovereign when farmers depend upon imported fertilizer, fuel, machinery, and unstable trade policy. It is not energy-sovereign when households and factories bear the cost of imported fuel and privately controlled electricity. It is not technologically sovereign when foreign corporations own the designs, equipment, software, and intellectual property upon which domestic production depends.

The contradiction in the SONA is that it used the language of self-sufficiency while deepening integration into foreign-led supply chains.

The President declared that Filipinos do not yield. But the address did not clearly state what conditions foreign investors must accept to protect domestic ownership, labor rights, natural resources, environmental integrity, and regulatory authority.

Sovereignty is not the refusal of international cooperation. No modern country produces everything it requires. Sovereignty is the ability to enter cooperation according to a national development plan rather than merely offering the country’s labor, land, minerals, and location to the plans of others.

Foreign policy must finally be judged by its developmental result. Do trade agreements build markets for Filipino-owned producers or merely expose them to more powerful competitors? Do technology partnerships create domestic knowledge or permanent dependence upon imported systems? Do security arrangements defend Philippine territory without surrendering diplomatic autonomy? Does foreign investment establish domestic industries or merely locate foreign production inside Philippine borders?

A nation exercises sovereignty not by refusing every alliance but by ensuring that each alliance enlarges its capacity for independent action.

The distorted opposition of the Dutertes

The inadequacy of the Marcos administration does not make the Dutertes a genuine alternative. It is unsurprising that diehard Duterte supporters would construct a distorted interpretation of the recent scandals, emphasizing whatever supports their own factional narrative while forgetting the continuities that implicate their political period.

They speak endlessly of flood-control corruption, the 18 alleged former servicemen presented as bagmen, and suitcases supposedly filled with money connected to former representative Zaldy Co. The purpose is often not to expose the political economy of corruption but to present the Dutertes as cleaner, more decisive, or more concerned with ordinary people than the Marcoses.

The available evidence does not permit such an innocent division. An Anti-Money Laundering Council investigator testified that approximately ₱802 million flowed from Sunwest Construction accounts to Co between 2019 and 2025. Prosecutors offered the transactions as evidence that Co remained a beneficial owner of the contractor despite his claimed divestment. The period spans both the Duterte and Marcos administrations.

The chronology is inconvenient to factional propaganda. It suggests that contractor influence and financial networks may survive changes in administration and alliances. A political-business network can operate under one president, adjust to another, and continue functioning even after the coalition between their families collapses.

The allegations of the so-called 18 Marines require similar discipline. The Armed Forces clarified that the individuals were no longer serving at the time of the alleged acts and that not all of them had been members of the Marine Corps. The National Bureau of Investigation later stated that the cash-delivery allegations remained unproven because of the absence of independent evidence, corroborating documents, and witnesses with direct personal knowledge.

This does not prove that every allegation was false. It establishes that an affidavit, a press conference, or a dramatic story about suitcases is not a substitute for corroborated evidence.

A viral video represented as footage of an actual suitcase delivery was also found to be unrelated footage from a repatriation flight. Other fabricated and artificial-intelligence-generated material involving Co circulated during the controversy.

A credible opposition must distinguish among authenticated bank records, sworn allegations requiring investigation, hearsay, circumstantial evidence, and manufactured digital propaganda.

Hatred of Marcos cannot transform false material into truth. Senator Alan Peter Cayetano supplied the more sophisticated version of the Duterte faction’s case. Discussing the detention or flight of members of the Senate minority, he said: “I believe that Senator Bato is in hiding unjustly because he cannot obtain justice. I believe that Senator Jinggoy Estrada and Senator Rodante Marcoleta are political prisoners and that, if the justice system had not been weaponized, they would at least have been allowed to post bail.”

He then asked: “Tell me that I am wrong, but should they be allowed to attend the impeachment trial? Tell me that I am wrong and that they are not political prisoners, but are they receiving justice? Is justice equal for everyone, or do we now have selective justice?”

Cayetano also called for the flood-control investigation to be completed, for those responsible to be held accountable, and for genuine institutional reforms. He asked: “Are we addressing the fact that whenever a Filipino needs a license, a business permit, pays real-property tax, or deals with customs, a payoff is expected? The culture of corruption continues to hold the country in its grip.”

The general questions are legitimate. Justice must indeed be equal. An anti-corruption campaign that prosecutes enemies while protecting allies is political vengeance administered through legal institutions.

But Cayetano weakened his principle by declaring powerful political allies to be political prisoners before the resolution of their cases.

Estrada and Marcoleta were detained in relation to accusations of plunder. Ronald dela Rosa was evading an International Criminal Court process connected with alleged crimes against humanity arising from the Duterte drug campaign. They possess rights to counsel, impartial proceedings, due process, and protection against unlawful treatment. Their political affiliation does not automatically convert criminal prosecution into political persecution.

Human-rights advocates objected that the use of political prisoner for politicians accused of corruption insulted hundreds of activists and organizers imprisoned because of their beliefs, advocacy, or political activity. Karapatan cited the experience of activists arrested during the Duterte administration and argued that prosecution for alleged plunder was not equivalent to imprisonment for organizing peasants, workers, indigenous communities, or political dissent.

The inconsistency is particularly striking because many Duterte allies displayed far less concern when activists, journalists, farmers, human-rights defenders, and opposition figures were red-tagged, prosecuted, threatened, or imprisoned under the previous administration.

Due process becomes sacred when its beneficiaries are senators. It was often treated as an inconvenience when its beneficiaries were poor, marginal, and politically inconvenient.

Cayetano’s intervention must also be understood in light of his long association with Rodrigo Duterte. He was Duterte’s vice-presidential running mate in 2016, served in his Cabinet, became House Speaker during his administration, and publicly defended major elements of the drug-war narrative. His concern over selective justice is not invalid merely because of this history. But the history requires the reader to ask why the language of civil liberty becomes most urgent when the persons in danger are members of his own political bloc.

Vice President Sara Duterte’s response to the SONA was less elaborate but more revealing. She said: “I did not watch the SONA, just as I did not watch it last year. I have no plan to read its contents or even a summary because I truly believe it is a waste of the Filipino people’s time.”

She reportedly made the remark while in The Hague on July 27, 2026. The statement was honest in a way she may not have intended. It exposed an opposition unwilling to perform the elementary intellectual work of opposition.

A presidential address may be misleading, selective, inflated, propagandistic, or dishonest. Those are reasons to examine it carefully, compare its claims with budgets and outcomes, and expose its contradictions. They are not reasons to refuse even to read a summary.

To dismiss the speech without scrutiny is to abandon the work of opposition: comparing promises with appropriations, statistics with household experience, declarations of reform with actual institutional change, and claims of national interest with the interests materially served.

One Duterte ally attempts to appear concerned with institutions, corruption, and equal justice. The other offers aloof contempt. Cayetano adopts the vocabulary of reform while directing it primarily toward the protection of political allies. Sara Duterte behaves as though hostility toward Marcos were itself a complete program of government.

What do their most enthusiastic supporters offer beyond opposition to Marcos? Another Duterte. That is not an alternative political economy. It is a competing claim upon the same state.

The Marcos and Duterte factions are not identical. They possess different styles, constituencies, regional networks, foreign-policy preferences, rhetorical methods, and relations with sections of the oligarchy. But both are deeply personalistic. Both rely upon political families, patronage alliances, police or military authority, discretionary public expenditure, and loyalty to personalities.

Both convert popular anger into allegiance to a dynasty. As their conflict is genuine as a struggle over office, protection, resources, succession, and control of state institutions. It is considerably less meaningful as a conflict between alternative social systems.

Neither faction proposes the redistribution of land, the strengthening of organized labor, the socialization of essential utilities, the dismantling of oligarchic monopolies, or a nationally controlled program of industrialization.

Their dispute is over who will administer the old structure, not whether the structure should survive. The Marcoses and the Dutertes are not identical coins. They are two sides of the same debased one.

Land, bread, justice, and sovereignty

The central absence of the SONA can be summarized through four demands older than its slogans: land, bread, justice, and sovereignty.

Land means more than distributing certificates while rural production remains subordinated to landlords, traders, lenders, importers, processors, land developers, and agribusiness corporations. It means effective control of the soil by those who cultivate it, protection against reconcentration, freedom from usurious debt, affordable credit, irrigation, domestic inputs, cooperative organization, and participation in processing and marketing.

Bread means more than rice assistance and temporary price limits. It means wages sufficient to maintain a household, secure employment, affordable electricity and water, public transportation, housing, health care, education, and an economy organized around producing what the domestic population requires. Bread is not charity. It is the material result of productive and distributive justice.

Justice means more than prosecuting the enemies of the administration. It includes accountability for contractors, legislators, and officials, but also justice for communities endangered by ghost infrastructure, for workers denied lawful wages, for farmers deprived of land, for households overcharged by utilities, for communities displaced by extraction and development, and for activists imprisoned or killed for challenging entrenched power. Justice cannot be selective between Marcos and Duterte camps. Neither can it be restricted to spectacular cases involving prominent personalities.

Sovereignty means more than defending maritime rights or invoking the arbitral award. It is the material capacity to determine how land, minerals, energy, water, labor, technology, finance, and industry will be used. It is the authority to impose national obligations upon foreign capital and to refuse arrangements that convert the country into an extraction site, military platform, labor reserve, or export enclave.

These demands are interconnected. Without land reform, food security remains dependent. Without decent wages and domestic production, bread remains precarious. Without institutional accountability, justice remains factional. Without productive capacity, sovereignty remains ceremonial.

The system of hope

It is not surprising that both Marcos and Duterte forces speak in the language of hope, concern, patriotism, justice, and national interest. Every ruling order must represent its own survival as the welfare of the nation.

The Marcos version is managerial and technocratic. It promises infrastructure, digitalization, foreign investment, artificial intelligence, clean energy, social protection, and orderly institutional reform. On the other hand, the Duterte version is combative and personalistic. It promises discipline, punishment, decisiveness, independence, and protection against enemies.

One offers modernization administered from above. The other offers anger administered from above. But Neither gives the people control from below.

This is why the 2026 SONA ultimately felt like a rehash. The details were new, but the sequence was old.

First, a crisis exposes the weakness of the economic structure. Second, the government attributes the crisis to war, world prices, corrupt individuals, or implementation failures. Third, temporary assistance is distributed. Fourth, foreign investment and infrastructure are announced as the long-term solution. Fifth, the President appeals for unity, patience, and confidence.

The country has waited through import liberalization, privatization, deregulation, export processing, public-private partnerships, Build, Build, Build, Build Better More, economic corridors, and now Pax Silica.

Each formulation promises that the next inflow of capital, the next infrastructure cycle, the next free-trade agreement, or the next position in a global value chain will finally produce development.

Yet land remains concentrated. Wages remain inadequate. Employment remains insecure. Electricity remains expensive. Agriculture remains vulnerable. Domestic manufacturing remains shallow. Political patrons continue to profit from budgets and contracts. Natural resources continue to be organized according to external demand.

Hope becomes an instrument of administration. It persuades people to interpret every failure as preparation for an approaching success. The promised future protects the institutions responsible for the present.

Beyond the recycled address

A serious State of the Nation Address would begin not with the number of beneficiaries reached but with the distribution of power that made so many people dependent upon assistance.

It would ask why farmers remain poor despite producing food; why workers remain insecure despite economic growth; why households pay so much for electricity; why public infrastructure becomes a source of kickbacks; why public services become revenue streams; and why decades of foreign investment have not created a deep Filipino-owned industrial base.

It would judge investment by actual capital spent, domestic value added, technology acquired, Filipino ownership, labor conditions, and ecological cost.

It would judge employment by wages, permanence, rights, and productive content.

It would judge agriculture by farmer income, land control, food affordability, and processing capacity.

It would judge health policy by the reduction of household medical spending, education by demonstrated learning, and anti-corruption policy by the ability to prosecute allies as well as opponents.

Most importantly, it would treat the people not merely as beneficiaries but as economic and political agents.

The 2026 SONA described an active administration. It did not describe a transformed state. It offered relief without redistribution, investment without industrial sovereignty, land titles without agrarian power, employment without secure occupations, and prosecution without the dismantling of patronage.

The country has heard this address before, spoken by different presidents under different slogans, with different foreign partners and political enemies.

Its central promise remains that development is approaching. Its central requirement remains that the people continue to bear the cost of waiting.

Until land, bread, justice, and sovereignty become the organizing principles rather than the ceremonial decoration of public policy, the annual State of the Nation Address will remain what it has too often been: an eloquent account of how the old order intends to survive another year.

*** 

References

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