Like Father, Like Daughter: Duterte Faces Trial, Yet the Nation Continues to Struggle
While the Senate spends its days poring over Vice President Sara Duterte’s bank records, ordinary Filipinos are dealing with a country that’s quietly falling apart. Inflation hit a three-year high of 7.2% in April. Economic growth has slid from 5.7% to a projected 4.0% this year — a P510-billion hit largely blamed on flood control corruption. And in flood-prone provinces, families are bracing for the next storm knowing the drainage systems built to protect them may not even exist.
That’s the backdrop the impeachment trial can’t escape. On Day 7, the Senate impeachment court granted a subpoena for Duterte’s bank, BIR, and AMLC records to probe unexplained wealth — happening in the same year investigators uncovered hundreds of “ghost” flood control projects that swallowed up to 70% of the allocated budget. Filipinos have every reason to ask: is this really about accountability, or just about which powerful family gets caught this time?
The prosecution’s case has leaned on some shaky logic — suggesting Duterte could carry out an assassination threat partly because of her father’s pending ICC case. That’s guilt by association, not proof. If the threat can’t stand on its own evidence, it shouldn’t need her father’s name to prop it up.
The defense isn’t much better. Insisting the case is “not supported by evidence” while resisting the release of financial records doesn’t read as innocence — it reads as delay.
Here’s the real problem: this trial is unfolding while the “Trillion Peso March” protesters are still asking why P1 trillion in public funds vanished into ghost projects, and why the same political families — Duterte, Marcos, Villar, Estrada, Revilla — keep cycling through power regardless of who’s implicated. An impeachment trial that drags on for optics, while flood victims wait for infrastructure that was already paid for, isn’t accountability. It’s a distraction dressed up as justice.
Filipinos don’t need a verdict that satisfies one political camp over another. They need proof that no family — Duterte or otherwise — is too big to be investigated properly, and that the same energy spent grilling one vice president gets spent recovering the trillion pesos still missing from everyone’s flood walls.
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