Vice President Sara Duterte recently voiced her dismay at the country’s “dire” state, attributing it to the poor leadership of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
This was nothing new, actually. In October 2024, she called her erstwhile UniTeam partner “Mr. Deception” and gave him a performance score of 1 on a scale of 1 to 10, saying Marcos “does not know how to be president.”
In a media interview last June 22, the impeached vice president said she’ll be skipping Marcos’ fourth state of the nation address on July 28, because she believed the chief executive will not be “providing anything substantial about our country.”
She said it would be best to spend her time with the Filipino community to discuss “what we can do for the country and to improve the country.”
When she did not attend Marcos’ SONA in 2024, more than a month after she resigned as education secretary, the vice president “appointed” herself as “the designated survivor,” a comment cited by the House of Representatives when it impeached her last February as one of her alleged efforts to destabilize the government.
“The state of the nation is dire. It is sad and for me personally, it is frustrating,” Duterte said in a June 22 interview while she was in Melbourne, Australia, where she attended a “Free Duterte Now” gathering and urged her Filipino supporters to bring the arrest of her father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, to the attention of the Australian government.
While painting the country’s state to be in bad shape in her speeches here and abroad, the vice president has forgotten, perhaps conveniently, that she remains part of the government, in fact the second-highest official in the executive branch, who has sworn to “faithfully and conscientiously fulfill” her duties, “preserve and defend” the Constitution, “execute its laws, do justice to every man, and consecrate myself to the service of the nation.”
On several occasions, Duterte has recognized that high prices, poverty, criminality and unemployment remain the top challenges Filipinos are struggling with. But how has she been contributing to finding solutions to these problems?
The Office of the Vice President still got a P733 million budget for 2025, which was about the same amount that her predecessor did. The amount may have been far below Duterte’s requested appropriation of P2.037 billion but still enough to make meaningful changes in the lives of poor Filipinos, just like how the previous vice president did.
It is quite disgusting to see and hear the vice president either ranting against the government or trying to be cute with her remarks and body language to endear herself to her audience, speaking spontaneously, oftentimes blabbering, with empty rhetoric without offering doable solutions to problems.
In a June 25 media interview, she lamented that the country has “leaders who are intellectually challenged at the moment,” which was a potshot at Marcos, who had been reported to have remarked that the Middle East conflict had no significant effect on the Philippine economy.
Despite the gloomy state of the economy she has been telling about, the vice president gives hope for the Philippines if Filipinos continue to aspire for a better country, even to become a “superpower.”
That sounds like a campaign speech three years away from the next presidential election. If and when Sara Duterte becomes president in 2028, how will she make things better? It sounds familiar, just like when many Filipino voters believed her father when he vowed to end criminality, get rid of corruption and illegal drugs in three to six months. Six years later, despite the killing of thousands of suspected drug personalities, he said even a lifetime was not enough to solve the problem.
While issues of incompetence, weak leadership and corruption have been hurled against the Marcos administration, things seem to be much better now than during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte. But since her split from the UniTeam after she failed to get the perks and privileges she had wanted, the vice president has been working relentlessly to undermine the Marcos administration so she could offer herself as an alternative, armed with favorable survey ratings.
How she has been contributing to nation-building is unclear. What is unquestionable is her share in destabilizing the government, sowing division among the people and spreading disinformation.
When the vice president speaks ill against her detractors and political enemies, the same things or even more could be said about her, her family and their camp. The saying, “When you point one finger at someone, three fingers are pointing back at you,” applies to her even when her remarks are intended as jokes.
The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of VERA Files.
This column also appeared in The Manila Times.
