The timing couldn’t be better.
President Bongbong Marcos is to deliver his 2026 State of the Nation Address (SONA) in the context of his declaration last year with regards massive corruption in the government’s flood control projects — corruption that’s been happening long before he became President: “Mahiya naman kayo!” he said to Congress Reps and Senators, LGU officials and contractors involved.
And while the dominant temperament is one that is impatient — bakit ang tagal? bakit konti lang? bakit hindi lahat? bakit may double-standard? — I tend to question that impatience and wonder about why it is we think these things are supposed to happen easily, or quickly.
Why it is that we think democracy moves fast and decisively with regards justice and fairness, especially given where we’re at: a dysfunctional, heavily corrupt, terribly unjust, completely polarized democracy.
Of course it can also move really fast ala Rodrigo Duterte. But that means violating the rights of each and every suspect, so declared as such, by (in)credible witnesses, if not invisible ones, bending the law when necessary, never mind human rights and nation.
Speedy noodles
In an old, viral, random one-off Tiktok video of Presidential sister Irene Marcos-Araneta, she advises people to stop eating what she calls “speedy noodles” — apparently what the fancier among us call instant noodles. She spoke specifically of those noodles that come in plastic cups, because she says that the microplastics can get into your system which is really bad for our health.
I think of it now in relation to the kind of “speedy” justice we have demanded since SONA 2025, waiting as we have for the “big fish” to be jailed for substandard flood control projects. We are certain the big fish aren’t there yet — it’s not Senator Jinggoy Estrada or former Senator Bong Revilla, no, those are not big enough fish as far as we are concerned. We want bigger, better personalities getting jailed. We want to watch it happen.
But how fast is fast? Is the speed we are looking for like that of the PNoy administration when it was able to hold GMA accountable for corruption? Is it the speed with which GMA was able to jail Erap? Or is it the speed with which Rodrigo Duterte was able to jail Senator Leila de Lima, and then the speed at which he started killing, disappearing, and jailing activists the moment the peace process went downhill?
Because that kind of “speed” comes with its own risks, and the outcomes haven’t really been favorable for our democracy. GMA just as quickly got out of those cases and made herself Congress Representative, alongside her two sons. Erap got out as soon as they were able to negotiate for his house arrest in San Juan; later, he would even receive an apology from Cory Aquino after we all realized how horrid GMA was. He would continue on as mayor of Manila and have his two sons across two wives (and one of those wives!) become senators.
The only shift to this narrative has to do with the jailed victims of the Duterte years. Former senator, now Congress representative, De Lima spent much of Duterte era in jail, her only real crime having been a target of Rodrigo’s from day one for having investigated Davao Death Squad killings during her tenure as Secretary of the Department of Justice.
Many militant left activists who were jailed on trumped up charges, usually through courts that functioned as Duterte’s arrest warrant factories, have yet to be released; too many senior citizen political prisoners remain in jail despite health conditions that have been worsened by the prison system, and despite no real witnesses to their purported “crimes” — they’re the ones who deserve speedy justice.
The democratic pace
Duterte and the police and military under his orders did quick work of justice. This makes me wonder what it is about “speed” that we like, given that we’ve seen it at its worst under the old man Duterte’s six years, when all it took was a declaration from the President about who his enemies are, and a slew of arrests would be made, killings optional.
This was a toxic time, one that fit within the frame of a “climate of fear”, as it would with a governance of impunity.
To a certain extent, I think this is, at its core, what the current impatience with Marcos is about. It is about having lived with a populist-dictator-fascist like Duterte who simply ignored due process so that he could claim justice and fairness as quickly as possible. After those six years, any form of due process will seem like it’s taking too long.
And so we keep asking: bakit ang tagal? I would add another word to that: demokrasya. Bakit ang tagal ng demokrasya? This is an important question with many possible answers. At its most basic, it is slow going because democracy values the rights of people, and it is due process that ensures those rights are respected.
We can also answer with another question: is it really taking too long, or have we simply gotten used to a former President with a santong paspasan, kamay-na-bakal governance, who simply bent the law to his will every time it was in the way.
I ask this because the dominant commentary against the President has to do with maleness. “Mahina siya”, or “Dinaga na naman”, or “Hindi decisive”, or “Walang sense of urgency”. All of these, unsurprisingly, are things you could never say about Duterte. This is not to say that we have to choose between the two; it is to say that the latter has messed up our sense of time (how long something takes), as it has our sense of justice and fairness (how we might achieve our goals through due process).
It seems important to get a handle on things, if only so we can figure out a balance. What is fast enough, what is too slow, relative to democracy — not the six years under the fascist, misogynist that was Duterte.
Slow burn
Maybe it is simply this: it seems to us that things are taking too long, that it is all too slow and tedious, because we haven’t seen democracy working this way in a very long time.
To begin with, the President didn’t need to engage at all with the flood control issue — he could’ve easily let it die in the purgatory of unaddressed issues that’s churned out every day about nation. That he decided to do so is important. It put everyone — Congress Reps, Senators, department employees and staff — under the microscope, and he knew very well that would include his relatives and allies. And while I am certain there are negotiations we are not privy to, about who and how and on what terms these cases will be filed, for the public, it has been important to see this unfold. This is what it looks like when our calls for accountability are heard, when a President decides a corrupt practice has to end.
With the release of contractors’ names, we were able to pinpoint how some members of the influencer-celebrity community have built names through the shameless display of ill-gotten wealth. With the current Department of Justice, the Ombudsman, the National Bureau of Investigation, we have a sense of what it looks like when government agencies work together against corruption. Yes it is slow, but it seems better than watching Duterte’s men railroad cases and policies just because their president said so, or had a bone to pick with someone.
The same might be said of all those Quad Comm Hearings that in the end led to the Sara Duterte impeachment trial. So many of us complain at how long the impeachment proceedings are. But this is what due process looks like. Due process allows the defense for VP Sara, lawyers and Senator-judges both, to prolong the proceedings with unnecessary, pointless, redundant questions that have nothing to do with the cases at hand. Due process gives us a sense of what the legal profession looks like in the hands of lawyers who are on the side of democracy, freedom, justice — and we do mean everyone on the prosecution side, especially Rep. Chel Diokno and Atty Amando Ligutan.
We are being disciplined here in the ways of due process, and it is a good reminder after having lived with six years where it didn’t exist at all.
Of course the discourse around the SONA will not have any of this patience. Discursively, it is messy at best, with the militant Left and the Duterte loyalists calling for a Marcos resignation — the former calling for all to resign, the latter only for BBM so that they can install Sara Duterte. The former insist that lahat ng sangkot dapat managot, the latter have been calling on BBM’s resignation since 2024, when the Vice President extricated herself from Uniteam.
The militant-Left call, while expected, simply feeds the Dutertes’ propaganda monster — it won’t matter that they call for the Vice President to be held accountable, too. In this age of social media soundbites, any call for Marcos to resign will be feeding the largest monster.
One also cannot fathom the danger of calling for a Marcos resignation, when it would simply install another Duterte as President, and if we learned our lesson from GMA’s assumption of power from Erap, that means being stuck with the same President beyond the usual six-year period. Why would we want that?
Besides, we are already deep into the Sara Duterte Impeachment Trial, which is teaching us about our democracy in new and different ways. Yes, it is a slow burn. And yes, it is not for the impatient. But maybe that is precisely the point. That after six years under a fascist-dictator, we are being allowed to slowly rebuild our sense of what democracy is about. And it is not about simply calling for the President to resign, or insisting on changing government altogether, as it might be about working within the limits of this democracy, and hopefully figuring out how we can keep it going, given the threat of a 2028 return to yet another Duterte for President.