Luffy Descartin Cebu City National Science High School
I keep hearing it in my head: “Sino ang taya? Sino ang kakampi at kasangga?” And in Philippine politics, I swear the answer changes faster than a press briefing after a scandal breaks. One day, there is unity. The next, alliances dissolve as though they had only ever been stitched together by convenience. I cannot tell anymore if I am watching governance or a very expensive performance where everyone insists it is policy, not theater.
I look at it and think: Jak en poy, hali-hali hoy, sinumang matalo ay siya’ng unggoy. Governance stops pretending to be policymaking and embraces its true identity as a childhood elimination game funded by public trust. Reform becomes rock, propaganda becomes paper, accountability becomes scissors — and somehow, the same hand keeps surviving every round as though it had already memorized the ending. The rest are simply renamed unggoy, depending on who needs a convenient villain that week.
Perhaps that should not surprise us. This is not a new game. It merely wears new uniforms.
Even during the Commonwealth era — when the Filipino nation still lay in the political womb of American oversight, not yet fully born but already learning the language of power — the rules were quietly taking shape. Before the Republic ever took its first breath, politics had already learned its favorite habits: switch sides when necessary, bend the truth when useful and smile as though nothing had happened afterward. Somewhere inside that womb, Jak en Poy was already being rehearsed. Loyalty became rock. Convenience became paper. Betrayal became scissors. Whoever no longer served the story became the unggoy.
Perhaps that is why the position of taya rotates so effortlessly, as though it were governed less by elections than by irony. Yesterday’s ally becomes today’s cautionary tale; tomorrow’s traitor returns as the next administration’s adviser. It feels less like betrayal than choreography — everyone knows the steps, yet no one admits they rehearsed them. And whenever the dance falls apart, the explanation is almost always the same: “Hindi magkatugma.” Of course it does not. Consistency has never been particularly useful to political survival.
Meanwhile, the rest of us sit through the spectacle like a rerun pretending to be a premiere. Every issue is “new.” Every scandal is “isolated.” Every promise is “contextual,” which is merely a polished way of saying, “Please don’t connect the dots.” The headlines change. The slogans change. Even the players change. Yet the mechanics remain untouched. In every round, someone must become taya, someone must become traydor and someone must be called unggoy so everyone else can pretend the game is fair.
And maybe that is the joke we are not supposed to notice. Nobody admits they are holding the scissors. Nobody admits they wrote the rules. Nobody ever wants to be “it.” Yet every round ends exactly the same way.
Jak en poy, hali-hali hoy, sinumang matalo ay siya’ng unggoy.
Maybe the truth is simpler than we would like to believe. We were never merely born into a republic that plays Jak en Poy.
We first learned its rules while we were still in the womb.