Fragile truth, hot news cycle

The year 2025 will be remembered for the flood-control corruption scandal and the high-stakes power play that split an otherwise united political team into two. It will also be remembered for what surprised many, the arrest of former president Rodrigo Duterte and his transfer to The Hague, Netherlands, to face charges of crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Court.

Here in Cebu, 2025 will be an unforgettable year because of two calamities: the northern Cebu earthquake and Typhoon Tino in the last quarter of the year. The earthquake destroyed homes and structures and displaced families, and the aftershocks kept residents on edge. But it was Tino that truly shocked Cebuanos on the early morning of November 4, when floodwaters inundated residential communities near waterways, bringing the issue back to environmental abuse and flood-control corruption.

Yesterday morning brought another shocker. Former Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) undersecretary Maria Catalina Cabral was found unconscious along the Bued River and later was declared dead, reportedly after falling from a cliff along Kennon Road in Tuba, Benguet, on Thursday night.

Following this tragic incident, it’s no surprise that speculation has spread on social media about the circumstances surrounding her death. One pundit even suggested that Cabral was crucial as a DPWH insider witness who could have linked names and documents to the criminal acts now being investigated by the Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI), and that answers to the corruption investigation may now be buried with her.

This reaction is itself a symptom of weak institutions. It suggests that the fight against corruption rises or falls on the fate of key witnesses, who can end up dead, be coopted into silence, or be bought into lying under oath. The loss of a witness is treated as a nearly fatal blow to the truth, which should not be the case if our institutions of governance, including at the community level, were strong.

That is why I often say the fight against corruption is doomed to a recurring cycle of failure if it depends mainly on political agenda, the heat of the moment, protest actions, or the loud voices of social media pundits and propagandists riding the news cycle. We must focus on the boring, slow work of strengthening our institutions: independent audit trails, robust witness protection, freedom of information and other transparency laws, and truly independent, politics-proof anti-corruption institutions, including the Ombudsman and the prosecution service, that can build cases even when powerful people are involved.

A nation where accountability is routine and widely shared is our best hope for good governance. But if truth is fragile, and justice can be delayed or derailed by simply removing the person responsible or the witness who knows what happened, corruption will continue, perhaps more resilient and with new players emerging.

In my daily morning prayer before starting the day, I always end it with the line, “Giyahi intawn ko, Lord, ngadto sa maayong dalan ug sa mga tawo’ng maayo’g binuhatan…” (Please guide me, Lord, to the right path and to people who do good deeds…). I say it because I do not trust myself alone to do what is good.

Power, or too much comfort, can atrophy the heart and mind, turning them toward self-interested deeds that harm the community. Notice how many people in power change almost overnight because their positions put them in situations that dull moral sensitivity and judgment, make empathy less sharp, and make self-restraint weaker, until corrupt choices start to feel normal. That is the nature of power, especially in this country.

So yes, let us build cases against those responsible for the infrastructure scandal. Preserve and protect witnesses. Strengthen our laws on transparency and good governance. But it should not stop there. Corruption is not only a crime. It is also a culture that learned to organize itself through family ties, brotherhood or barkada loyalty, and patronage favors, then hides behind Filipino outward piety and mild manners. If we keep fighting it only when the news cycle is hot, as when the president himself exposed it in his SONA, we will end up back where we started once the issue dies down.

We can turn our Filipino traits and everyday networks and inner circles into civic infrastructure that monitors government action and builds organizations beyond elections. That is how accountability becomes sustainable, not an occasional uprising. I’ll elaborate on that harder work in my next column.