By Robert B. Roque, Jr.
Zaldy Co could have taken the legitimate route: testify before the Senate or the Independent Commission on Infrastructure (ICI) probing the multibillion-peso flood-control scam.
He could have done it in person or over Zoom. Those were the proper venues, not a conveniently timed social media video dropped days before a scheduled rally. I’m not alone in asking about the timing of his coming-out video, which was released a couple of days before the grand rally of a religious group.
Senator Leila de Lima, with good reason, has expressed concern. She points out that the Iglesia ni Cristo’s three-day “transparency rally” is suspiciously separate from the massive Trillion Peso March last month. If this were purely about accountability, why splinter the movement?
Again, she’s not alone in reading this bluntly that the military is watching whether this snowballs into a critical mass, where ordinary Filipinos would swell the crowds into the millions. They’re seeing if this snowballs and sustains momentum beyond Day 3.
Her assessment points to something deeper: a possible agenda to unseat the Marcos administration, which would conveniently place the Vice President at the helm. And because INC has long been aligned with the Dutertes, this “call for transparency” begins to look less like civic outrage and more like a carefully packaged attempt to reinstall the old power bloc.
Into this walks Co, whose revelations land like ammunition for that plan, if indeed there is one. But he is not only naïve but foolish if he thinks that toppling this administration is the path to his exoneration. If his newfound courage to expose the President is only a means to advance the interests of political forces already being rejected after six years of wanton killings, then Co is simply serving a faction no different from the one he accuses.
Let’s be clear: Vice President Sara Duterte is hardly the beacon of integrity here. She is mired in questions over seriously huge Department of Education (DepEd) funds. Add to that, her father’s foreign-policy posturing is disturbingly aligned with China’s agenda. That, to my mind, is treasonous.
What’s repulsive about Co’s revelations is that he frames himself as the victim, as the “used” man of Malacañang, when clearly every previous testimony painted him and former Speaker Martin Romualdez as alleged partners in plunder like the Mutt and Jeff that fed billions into the DPWH underworld.
And now comes this INC rally — a perfect stage for a political storm they hope will blow the President out of Malacañang. They’re selling it as some righteous crusade against corruption, yet, who do they want to replace him? That’s why many among us refuse to demand anyone’s resignation at this point, if only to install another likely opportunist.
So, I find myself in a quandary just as my fellow journalists from the ’80s now do. We once rose and swore never to allow another Marcos in power, and we are suddenly — as Randy David had pointed out — unwilling to demand this Marcos’s resignation. This is not because we want to protect him till 2028, but because the alternative is a return to something even darker.
I, like many other frustrated Filipinos, just cannot stand the hypocrisy. We demand reform in government, an end to systemic graft, and justice for every peso stolen from us, but what we get instead are spectacles pretending to be truth-telling. And until Co backs his words with real proof, including that which would incriminate himself and the most guilty, all he has offered is a monologue designed to serve selfish political ends.
That’s why my protest remains in this corner but strives to be a call that rings in the halls of power: a demand for real reform and real anti-corruption. Jail the guilty — yellow, pink, red, green, any color.
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