The ‘Enoki SONA’ reflects Marcos’ incompetence

PRESIDENT Ferdinand Marcos Jr. certainly scored a lot of points when he announced within the first two minutes of his State of the Nation Address (SONA) that the Ombudsman is “close to filing a lot” (patong patong) of (corruption) charges against the former House speaker. He couldn’t get himself to name the person referred to, his cousin Martin Romualdez, though.

I’m not holding my breath though. We’ll know it’s for real only when the Ombudsman sends that cousin to jail, as fast as he did the most articulate opposition senator, Rodante Marcoleta, as well as former congressman Michael Defensor. 

We could be moving into “interesting times” with Marcos’ announcement. Romualdez said angrily in an April video message: “If this is a political play to push me out and close the story, tarnishing my name and my reputation, then I am telling everyone now: I will not go quietly, and I will not go alone. I will not be the fall guy for other people’s corruption.” Many interpreted the “other people” as Marcos and his wife.

What a president chooses to boast about in his SONA reveals what he actually has in his warehouse. By that rule, the president’s fifth SONA last July 27 was among the most revealing speeches of his term — not for what it claimed, but for how small the claims were, which means that he doesn’t have a clue what governance entails.

This was the fifth of his six SONAs, delivered at the start of a presidency’s harvest season, when an administration should be reaping what it planted and reporting the yield. Instead, wedged between the corruption mea culpa and the crisis narrative of the Middle East war, Congress was asked to applaud an inventory of trivia so modest that a bored listener had to wonder: Is this really all there is?

Consider what made it into the address. Among the “helpful and innovative teaching aids” that the government has given public school teachers, the president enumerated “Smart TVs, laptops, tablets, free mobile data, and even lapel microphones.” DepEd records show a P422.8-million procurement covering 879,533 lapel voice amplifiers, apparently one for every teacher, budgeted at P480 each. Note that all these required the purchase of the items from private companies — which has always been the easiest opportunity for corruption.

Even the publicly posted documents for lapel microphones establish only that the units were bid out and allocated; they contain no notice of award proving that the 879,533 had actually reached the teachers. Lapel microphones — clip-on mics — nevertheless merited a line in a national address delivered before Congress, the Supreme Court and the diplomatic corps. This DepEd claim even deserves investigation: Lapel microphones would be the last in any list of must-haves in improving education, especially considering that we have a backlog of 144,000 classrooms. Why spend nearly half a billion pesos for it?

Our export breakthroughs? “We have now ventured into new and viable ones, like enoki mushrooms.” “Our electric-vehicle revolution”? One experimental ferry boat built by UP and DOST, which someday, we are promised, will ply the Pasig River. Our entry into the space age? “Yes, we are going to launch a rocket into space,” the president boasted. A small suborbital research rocket, to be launched next year, to be undertaken entirely by a small South Korean start-up Perigree Aerospace. If he intends to watch the launch, I suggest Marcos just views it through CCTV.

Then came the fee waivers, each with its own applause line. The Cebu Port terminal fee — a charge that costs less than a fast-food meal — “naging libre.” The terminal fee at the PITX, suspended for all of three months. The RoRo terminal fee for agricultural cargo, cut from P500 to one peso. Expressway toll discounts “umabot hanggang halos dalawang daang piso” — reaching almost P200. Special train discounts every Sunday (not on workdays) and on “mahahalagang kapistahan.” Fiesta discounts, reported to the Republic as governance.

Three unflattering patterns run through the speech.

Claiming other people’s work

The first pattern is the annexation of other institutions’ actions as presidential accomplishments. The president reported that “maraming bangko at e-wallet na ang nagbaba o nagtanggal ng kanilang sinisingil na online transaction fee.” By the speech’s own language, government merely “hinikayat” — encouraged — them. The fee cuts were private business decisions, herded into the administration’s column of achievements.

The same sleight of hand appears in the power sector. “Ipinag-utos natin ang agarang pag-refund ng mga kumpanya ng kuryente na may sobrang nasingil sa mga kustomer nito,” he declared. But refunding over-collections is not a presidential favor; it is a legal obligation state regulators have enforced for decades. Ordering a utility to return money it was never entitled to keep is not an accomplishment. It is the bare minimum of regulation.

The loan moratoriums granted by the banks, and by the GSIS, SSS, Pag-IBIG and NHMFC, were likewise counted as relief delivered by the administration. The dredging of esteros and imburnals by the MMDA — routine, budgeted maintenance the agency performs every rainy season — was elevated into “Oplan Kontra Baha,” a national anti-flood campaign. The repair of collapsed bridges — San Juanico, Cabagan-Sta. Maria, Piggatan, Calbiga — was reported to applause, as if fixing broken infrastructure were a policy triumph rather than the most elementary duty of a public works department.

Deferral dressed up as relief

The second pattern is the presentation of postponements as benefits. Electricity consumers were “allowed” to pay their May-to-July bills in installments, and disconnections were banned while they did so. The debts remain; only the reckoning was moved. Bank borrowers got six months’ grace, a year if the loan was agricultural — deferred, not reduced. The excise taxes on LPG and kerosene were suspended for three months, to return in the fourth.

The most remarkable specimen concerned petroleum prices. The president reported, as an achievement, that “hindi naging biglaan ang pagtaas ng presyo ng petrolyo, kundi pa-unti-unti sa loob ng isang linggo.” The increase was not sudden as in a day, but, spread over one week. The pump price still rose by the same amount; the accomplishment was the speed at which the pain arrived. This is a surgeon boasting that the amputation was performed slowly.

Everything big is in the future tense

The third pattern is the most telling: nearly everything of consequence in the speech has not happened yet. The North-South Commuter Railway will run between Valenzuela and Malolos “sa susunod na taon.” Didn’t anybody tell him that this was first announced by President Benigno Aquino III in 2014, and accelerated through President Rodrigo Duterte’s “Build, Build, Build” program.

The 12 stations of MRT-7 open next year. Of the 200 power projects with a combined 10,000 megawatts that the president cited, only 45 are finished; 124 are “inaasahang matatapos” — expected to be completed — by 2028, safely at the edge of this presidency. Nuclear energy? “Perhaps it is time for us to revisit” it. One hundred million coconut trees — by the end of the administration. Even the anti-corruption centerpiece obeys the pattern: Of the P25 billion supposedly “recovered, frozen and preserved” from the flood control racket, only some P800 million — barely 3 percent — has actually reached the Treasury, as I detailed in this space earlier this week.

The May 1 job fairs give the method away in miniature. Government mounted nearly a hundred of them, at which “halos tatlong daang libong trabaho ang pinagbigay-alam natin sa publiko” — 300,000 jobs were announced to the public. The actual hires that day: “lagpas anim na libong Pilipino” — a little over 6,000, or 2 percent. The announcement was the accomplishment; the outcome was a rounding error.

Why does this matter — beyond the annual sport of SONA-checking? Because a fifth SONA is a presidency’s verdict on itself. Yet Marcos’ claims in his SONA even verges on being fake news. For example he said that despite the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, he got to buy and import the needed oil from Japan, South Korea, Oman, India, and even Russia and China.

The Philippine National Oil Company did run an actual emergency-buying program: It procured about 1.3 million barrels of diesel total between late March and April 2026, split across four cargoes from Japan, Malaysia/Singapore, “North Asia or India” and Oman. Against a national diesel demand of roughly 190,000-202,000 barrels a day, that 1.3 million barrels — accumulated over nearly a month — amounts to a few days’ worth of the country’s diesel needs.

The more genuinely consequential diversification was Russia, which supplied 2.48 million barrels of crude, bypassing Hormuz entirely through the ESPO pipeline. But Marcos and his bureaucracy had nothing to do with that. It was entirely done by Petron, thanks to its CEO Ramon Ang’s proven adeptness and swiftness in responding to crisis.

When the “I-accomplished-these” portions of a SONA must be populated by lapel microphones, enoki mushrooms, one-peso terminal fees, a single electric ferry and a borrowed rocket, the verdict writes itself.

What happened is that the Presidential Management Staff asked the departments to submit their accomplishments to be included in the SONA and the heads of course overstated these and even included work still to be done. Marcos’ PMS simply collated these and these mostly junior staff judged which should go into his speech, Marcos’ contribution was solely the Romualdez thing.

But policy agendas, a vision where the nation should be going, crucial laws the Congress must pass to develop our economy swiftly? These are over his head. Marcos has no clue, in speeches. and in governance.

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The ‘Enoki SONA’ reflects Marcos’ incompetence
Source: Breaking News PH