And so this is 2026… not quite the hopeful refrain of a new year unfolding, but a pause heavy with questions: what have we done, and what has been done to us? For many Filipinos, the turn of the calendar feels less like renewal and more like reckoning — politically bruised, economically cautious, and socially worn down by a year that tested both patience and trust.

That mood is captured starkly in the latest year-end survey by PAHAYAG, the public opinion initiative of PUBLiCUS Asia, Inc., with Vox Opinion Research as its commissioned arm — an outfit that has tracked Filipino sentiment since 2017 and knows when discontent is not just noise, but a pattern.

Nearly six in ten Filipinos, or 58%, say they are pessimistic about the country’s direction as 2026 approaches. While that figure is an improvement from the bleak 70% recorded the previous quarter, it remains significantly worse than the 49% registered a year ago. Optimism has ticked up to 42%, driven largely by better expectations for household finances and the economy — but even that remains below last year’s levels. The numbers surely mirror a nation far from reassured.

After all, 2025 was not short on reasons to worry. A trillion-peso flood control scandal exploded into public view, triggering resignations, flight risks, and a deepening sense that accountability remains selective. The IMF downgraded the country’s growth outlook, while economic expansion slowed to its weakest pace in four years. High-stakes political shocks followed: impeachment proceedings against the Vice President, plunder and graft complaints, and the arrest of a former president on an ICC warrant — events that would rattle even the most mature democracies.

Nature, too, showed no mercy. The Philippines was again named the world’s most disaster-prone country, battered by super typhoons, deadly earthquakes, and relentless flooding that displaced hundreds of thousands. PAGASA now warns of a wetter-than-average 2026 under La Niña — hardly comforting news for communities still rebuilding.

And yet, pessimism is not surrender. Filipinos have endured worse and endured together. There is resilience in the young who still believe, in workers here and abroad whose remittances keep the economy afloat, in public servants and private citizens who quietly do the right thing. The survey may measure doubt — but it also hints at resolve. Even after a bruising year, the country has not lost its capacity to rise.

Let me cite a specific example close to my heart: the passionate work done by my fellow members of the Manila Sampaguita Lions Club led by Club President Christian Munoz to spread joy and sustenance to 200 street dwellers in Malate, Manila.

For the fifth Christmas since 2021, our club’s feeding and gift-giving project for street dwellers was made possible again through a steady and generous donation from San Miguel Corporation.

The outreach activity, originally slated last December 10, hit a logistical snag that made it easy to shelve the effort. Christmas had already passed, but pessimism did not rule our hearts. The donations still arrived, and members still attended.

On a late-night convoy on December 29, ready-to-eat meals and bottled water made their way to families sleeping on sidewalks. The project was realized — not as a consolation act after the holidays — but as a deliberate gesture to usher the homeless into 2026 with something many had been denied all year: reassurance. Food that could last a few days, not just as a buffer against hunger, but a strong reminder that they had not been forgotten.

Perhaps this is how pessimism is truly countered… through quiet acts that reset someone’s outlook. For those street dwellers in Malate, at least, the Manila Sampaguita Lions and San Miguel Corporation may have done something remarkable: they may have crossed a few names off the list of Filipinos entering 2026 with dread and replaced it, even ever so briefly, with hope.

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SHORT BURSTS. For comments or reactions, email firingline@ymail.com or tweet @Side_View via X app (formerly Twitter). Read current and past issues of this column at https://www.thephilbiznews.com

The death of former DPWH Undersecretary Cathy Cabral has reopened a familiar wound in Philippine public life, reviving memories of the late DILG Secretary and former Armed Forces chief Angelo Reyes — not because the circumstances of their deaths are identical, but because both occurred at moments when unresolved questions of power, accountability, and corruption loomed heavily over their public service.

Angelo Reyes’s death in 2011 came at the height of intense scrutiny over alleged irregularities in military funds. His passing transformed a corruption inquiry into a national reckoning, exposing not only the fragility of reputations built over decades but also the immense psychological burden placed on officials once controversy becomes relentless and public. For many Filipinos, it was a moment when governance ceased to be abstract and became painfully human.

Cabral’s death evokes similar reflections. As a senior official in the Department of Public Works and Highways — an agency long associated with vast budgets and politically sensitive infrastructure projects — she occupied a position where knowledge is power and discretion is currency. Her passing is particularly unsettling because it comes amid unresolved questions surrounding the controversial flood-control projects that have drawn public outrage and investigative attention.

With Cabral’s death, there is a growing perception that critical knowledge may have been buried with her — including who truly benefitted from questionable flood-control allocations and how decisions were made within the bureaucracy. In corruption cases, especially those involving layered approvals and diffuse responsibility, insiders often carry the connective truths that documents alone cannot fully reveal. When such individuals are suddenly gone, accountability becomes more difficult, and justice becomes even more elusive.

Recognizing this risk, the Office of the Ombudsman has reportedly directed authorities to secure and preserve Cabral’s mobile phone and electronic devices, signaling that even in death, potential evidence must be protected. Investigators may yet find digital trails — messages, call logs, files — that could shed light on networks of influence and decision-making processes that extend beyond a single official. In an era where governance increasingly leaves electronic footprints, devices can speak when people can no longer do so.

The parallel with Angelo Reyes lies not in assigning guilt, but in confronting a recurring national dilemma: how corruption investigations intersect with human limits. Both cases force uncomfortable questions about whether the Philippine political system and social media know how to pursue accountability without becoming crushingly punitive, and whether due process is adequately shielded from spectacle, rumor, and moral absolutism.

These deaths also expose a deeper institutional weakness. When systems rely too heavily on individuals holding sensitive knowledge — rather than transparent, well-documented processes — truth becomes fragile. The loss of one official should not threaten the unraveling of an entire investigation. Yet time and again, it does.

Ultimately, the deaths of Reyes and Cabral compel reflection not just on personal tragedy, but on systemic failure. They challenge the state to ask whether it has built institutions strong enough to outlast individuals, investigations resilient enough to survive loss, and a culture of accountability that does not exact a fatal human cost.

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SHORT BURSTS. For comments or reactions, email firingline@ymail.com or tweet @Side_View via X. Read current and past issues of this column at https://www.thephilbiznews.com

The Senate’s approval on second reading of a P6.793-trillion spending plan for 2026 should usher in a moment of resolve. Now, more than ever, the government must prove it can wield enormous resources with competence and integrity.

What most Filipinos question these days is the ability of the Marcos Junior administration to take on a monumental national budget, when in the last three years, all it has proven is the opposite: that it is utterly inept at making our taxes work for our people.

The nightmare of ghost flood-mitigation projects under the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) remains hanging over our heads. It’s like a gaping wound that exposes how billions can vanish into thin air while communities drown.

These scandals that have dragged many political characters close to the administration to infamy are not just stories for sharing on social media. They’re evidence of criminal acts in government, of a system incapable of tracking, monitoring, or safeguarding funds meant for public infrastructure and basic services. Evidence that every peso we surrender to the state is at risk of spillovers, kickbacks, or outright theft.

Ever so cautiously, Firing Line will commend the Senate for making appropriate adjustments in preparing the spending bill for 2026. Let me cite how it slashed DPWH’s budget by P55.91 billion, cut P68.5 billion from bloated unprogrammed appropriations, and increased funding where it actually matters — classrooms, universities, and internal security.

Senator Ping Lacson deserves credit for pushing the Chamber to remove “allocables” — what he has termed as the “new pork barrel” or those shadowy, pre-identified funds waiting for favored contractors and rigged bids.

The resistance he faced only proves how entrenched this behavior remains among some members of the august body. Pardon me – not so august, since a number of them are actually implicated in the worst government project thefts in history.

More than budget cuts on paper, perhaps the real measure of reform in planning the budget is in ensuring that massive allocations are not allowed to sit idly in department coffers. Some offices of government are praised wrongfully for their “savings,” which are actually project funds that are unspent — ergo, no output.

In other cases, such departments like the DPWH are bloated with funding, but they could only pretend to execute thousands of projects, even if, in actuality, there are too few qualified contractors to faithfully follow the design and finish the job.

We’ve already seen what happens when the big players and triple-A contractors snare the projects but resort to subcontracting down the ladder. Former Public Works chief Babes Singson himself warned how substandard builders end up holding the bag, and the public pays the price in crumbling work and wasted funds.

Congress must protect public money — not just from corruption, but from incompetence. The point is not to brag about a big number when drafting the budget to trillions. The point is to ensure a budget that is realistic, executable, and honest, grounded in the hard truth that government exists to serve the Filipino, not to enrich those who treat taxpayers as collateral damage.

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SHORT BURSTS. For comments or reactions, email firingline@ymail.com or tweet @Side_View via X. Read current and past issues of this column at https://www.thephilbiznews.com

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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SHORT BURSTS. For comments or reactions, email firingline@ymail.com or tweet @Side_View via X. Read current and past issues of this column at https://www.thephilbiznews.com