Turmoil

If President Marcos Jr. had planned at all to vindicate the Marcos name, it doesn’t look like he is succeeding one bit – a fate not unlike leaders elsewhere who tried to rewrite their family legacies, only to be swamped by their own controversies, from Indira Gandhi to Park Geun-hye.

Indira Gandhi, India’s first and only female prime minister, sought to uphold the legacy of her father but ended up with an authoritarian style of leadership, while South Korea’s former president Park Geun-hye was impeached due to a corruption scandal even as she attempted to restore that sense of national pride tied to her father’s legacy.

Now, what do we have here? We have a massive, massive corruption scandal that has unraveled so grotesquely that there’s no telling anymore how this will end.

And the plot thickens every day, with Friday’s latest twist seeing ex-lawmaker and presidential ally Zaldy Co pointing to BBM himself as involved in budget insertions.

Ah, what a mess BBM is in now. While there are no martial law-era military tanks or truncheon-wielding police roaming the streets of Metro Manila, today’s political climate is dark and uncertain.

Co’s video statement provided vignettes of the extent of corruption under the Marcos administration, which points to only two possibilities: either Marcos was himself involved, as Co alleged, or that the President was too nonchalant to care what was happening under his nose.

For sure, the resigned party-list lawmaker dropped a bombshell – that Marcos had instructed his cousin, then-House speaker Martin Romualdez, to insert P100 billion in the proposed 2025 outlay, supposedly for kickbacks, and that he was advised not to return to the country as the flood control scandal erupted. He also implicated Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman.

The second part of his revelations showed photographs of dozens of suitcases supposedly containing cash, which he said were delivered to North Forbes and to Aguado Residence, across Malacañang on different dates last year.

But as Sen. Ping Lacson said, Co’s testimony had no probative value because it was not done under oath.

Come home, Zaldy

The only thing left for Co to do is to come home, not only to testify and prove his claims, but also to face the scandalous allegations against him – a predicament not unlike Catiline in ancient Rome or Silvio Berlusconi in modern Italy, men who made bold accusations even as they battled charges of their own.

Unfortunately, what is happening now is a national scandal that is setting us back again for months, or even years.

The longer this drags on without credible resolution, the deeper we will fall and the worse the economy will suffer.

Restless tycoons

Some of the country’s tycoons are quietly getting restless and frustrated over the way things are going, fearing that the economy will surely suffer from the fallout even years after we recover from this – if that day would even come.

One tycoon, said to have the ear of the President, already suggested early on that there should be special courts to try the cases of those involved in flood control corruption.

This could be done through a special division of the Sandiganbayan, since the establishment of any court lower than the Supreme Court would require legislation by Congress, a move our lawmakers would surely not agree to. Why would they dig their own grave?

But the Sandiganbayan has not made any announcement on this and yes, as I write this, nobody has yet been sent to jail over the flood control corruption.

Bankers, too

Bankers, too, are not happy with the way things are unfolding. Their business from infrastructure contractors – the legitimate ones – has been badly affected because the release of government funds has significantly slowed. This has affected construction companies’ ability to pay their loans to banks.

Diplomats

The diplomats on duty in our country are also busy talking to their sources, such as politicians and journalists, as they prepare their own dispatches to their home countries, like straggler spies from scenes out of Netflix’s The Diplomat or AppleTV’s Slow Horses.

Goodbye, stocks

And then there’s the Philippine stock market, which sank to a five-year low on Friday after Co’s bombshell.

The benchmark PSEi snapped its two-day climb, plunging by 2.49 percent to 5,584.35 – the index’s worst finish since closing at 5,570.22 on May 28, 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Foreigners dumped P104.62 million worth of stocks.

Everyone is clearly taking a hit from this largest corruption scandal that is taking our country by storm, not to mention the fact that we still have to grapple with real storms and typhoons that are ripping through our islands.

Everyone, perhaps, except Marcos’ political foes and their allies. They are surely laughing their hearts out over the implosion of the administration.

We heard that BBM is trying to mend ties with his manang Imee, who has a strong alliance with the Dutertes, to cool down the brewing tensions ahead of this week’s big anti-corruption rally of the Iglesia ni Cristo, a powerful religious bloc which endorsed Rody Duterte in 2016.

Meantime, that Friday evening, as monstrous traffic and the occasional drizzle paralyzed the roads, desperate Filipinos were stuck in the streets of Metro Manila.

Now I can’t help but wonder how far those billions in cash in Zaldy Co’s suitcases would have gone if they had actually been used to improve transport and flood-control infrastructure in the country.

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Email: [email protected]. Follow her on X @eyesgonzales. Column archives at EyesWideOpen on FB.