The ground trembled again last week in Cebu, in Baguio, in Davao. But while the plates of the earth shift only once in a while, the moral fault lines of this country shake every day.
We count aftershocks on the Richter scale, yet fail to measure the magnitude of corruption that splits the nation’s spine. Buildings may fall, but what has long been crumbling is something deeper: our faith in the very institutions meant to protect us. And at the epicenter of this quiet devastation now stands a newly appointed Ombudsman, Jose Crispin Remulla, whose character is as questionable as the scandals that cloak his appointment.
When the guardian of justice shields the guilty instead of the people, corruption ceases to be a crime; it becomes culture. The Office of the Ombudsman was built to be the nation’s conscience, the Tanodbayan, protector of the weak. Today it resembles a fortress of excuses, guarded by men who mistake discretion for cowardice and secrecy for integrity. How can the moral compass point north when the one holding it spins toward the powerful?
While rubble is being cleared in Cebu, Baguio, and Davao, another kind of debris piles up in the capital: flood control scams, fractured leadership, ghost projects, and politicians laughing over the wreckage of public trust. The political institutions are in chaos; the Senate now trades blows instead of ideas, and the Lower House lies in moral rubble, its conscience buried under the weight of convenience and compromise. We rebuild homes after every earthquake, yet never rebuild the character of those who rule us. The tremors under our feet may last seconds; the corruption above us lasts generations.
This, then, is the real earthquake of the Republic: a trembling of values, a collapse of accountability, a landslide of decency buried under impunity. It spares no island, no office, no faith.
If there is one reconstruction worth funding, it is the rebuilding of conscience from barangay hall to Malacañang, from city council to the Ombudsman’s desk. For the nation can survive cracked bridges and fallen towers, but it cannot survive leaders whose souls have turned to dust.
The shaking will end. The aftershocks will fade. But until honesty returns to the highest chambers of power, the Philippines will remain an unstable archipelago not of islands, but of scandals.
And if Jose Crispin Remulla is the best we can appoint as the nation’s moral guardian, then perhaps the greater tragedy is not corruption itself but the scarcity of good men left to fight it.
At the end of every quake, we ask: how strong was it? Perhaps the harder question is, how weak have we become?