Sara’s character loan

Banking has a facility called a character loan. It is a clean loan, given without the lender or the bank demanding collateral. The bank simply relies on the borrower’s personal integrity, reputation, employment record and connections.  In short, his or her character.

The joke with character loans, however, is that when the loan matures, the character disappears. The banker then exclaims, “What a character!”

In May 2028, Vice President Sara Duterte will run for president.

In effect, Sara will be obtaining a loan – a character loan from the electorate. It is a loan because the besieged VP will be asking the electorate for their mandate – the equivalent of borrowing their trust and their approval, for a period of six years.

From her recent work or employment in the immediately preceding past, Sara has very little to show in terms of output, productivity and reputation as loan collateral. As a character, she is not entitled to any kind of loan.

During Sara’s abbreviated stint as secretary of the Department of Education (DepEd), the nation’s largest bureaucracy (almost a million teachers and the highest priority in budgetary allocation, P1 trillion), Filipino 15-year-olds were rated the most stupid on earth. They cannot read, cannot write and cannot count beyond 20.

Also, Sara ordered hundreds of thousands of laptops – overpriced and below specs, and simply junked in the garbage bin. She regularly handed out bribe envelops to subalterns so that during procurement and biddings (remember, DepEd has a trillion-peso annual budget) they would simply look the other way or would suddenly be afflicted with FMS – four monkeys syndrome: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The fourth monkey is the sum of all three.

As the nation’s second highest official, Sara had fits of anger, angst, anxiety. In late November 2024, her beloved Zuleika Lopez, under House arrest in Congress for obfuscating before congressmen, was seen on video emotional and desperate for help, fearing for her life.

Accordingly, Sara went ballistic and disclosed during an unholy hour press conference, from a makeshift dungeon, she had contracted assassin/s to kill three very important people – President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr., First Lady Louise Araneta Marcos and then Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez. To assure doubting listeners, she quickly added, “No Joke, No Joke!” Two days later, Sara confirmed what she said in her Nov. 23, 2024 138-second video – she indeed contracted assassins to engage in a revenge killing spree.

Readily available online, the incriminating video was dutifully copied by the NBI which authenticated it with Meta which preserved it. So the video is not a rumor nor a hearsay. It is evidence that an actor like Robin Padilla or self-proclaimed expert lawyers like the siblings Pia and Alan Peter Cayetano can determine as solid, compelling, convincing even to the most stupid monkeys not afflicted with FMS.

Still, surveys indicated Sara would win the 2028 presidential polls hands down. Such a potentially huge mandate is a big, big character loan.

All for the privilege to manage the country and its economy for six years, with the guarantee, not written (just like the kill contracts of professional assassins), that she will do well as president, render the greatest good for the greatest number and meet people’s expectations. That unlike her famous dad, she will not kill up to 30,000 innocent victims in the name of peace and order; that unlike her dad, she will not turn over the Philippines’ sovereignty to the Chinese; unlike her dad, she will not employ Chinese foreign agents who are criminals on the side, as advisers (remember a certain Michael Yang?) and unlike her dad, she will not appoint corrupt officials to positions of power where they can enrich themselves and to preserve their loot, they will seek employment at the Office of the Ombudsman and at the Sandiganbayan.

Sara’s character loan thus is huge. In 2022, when she ran for vice president, she was elected with the highest number of votes ever for a VP – 32 million. Her defense counsels in the current Senate impeachment court trial claim the 32 million-vote mandate as ground to explain she cannot possibly do any wrong because she was elected by 32 million Filipinos. The voice of the people is the voice of God. And God doesn’t make mistakes. And who the hell would want to make God accountable? Wala. Di ba?

Therefore, Sara cannot be made accountable. She cannot – even if:

One, she pocketed P612.5 million of people’s money while holding office at the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and the Department of Education (DepEd), where “honesty is the best policy” and “Thou Shall Not Steal” is a 24/7 mantra. Then she created thousands of receipts listing people with names taken from famous restaurants and chichirya favorites to cover up the expenditures. Why adopt popular dishes and restaurants for names of alleged recipients? Is the scheme a code word to mean the unaccounted millions were literally gobbled up without a trace? Was it to inspire a higher degree of intelligence among its recipients? Remember, the millions are supposedly intelligence funds. It requires tedious intelligence work to trace the millions now, what with Sara refusing to cooperate. Remember, her 32 million-vote mandate is divine. With such a setup, it’s hard to divine the truth. AI says that “divine means to discover, understand or predict something through intuition, insight or supernatural powers.”

Two, she accumulated unexplained wealth as proven by entries in her bank accounts, where the Anti-Money Laundering Council religiously catalogued huge amounts totaling P6.77 billion as having been transacted. Inflow and outflow, over a period of 18 years, during which period she earned only P30 million in salaries. This makes her a billionaire, a multi-billionaire. Where did the P6.77 billion come from? Manna from heaven? Remember the voice of God?

Three, she regularly bribed her subalterns at DedEd and the OVP.

Four, she threatened to kill super VIPs.

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