WHEN President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. stepped up to the podium at the Batasang Pambansa yesterday (July 27) for his fifth State of the Nation Address (this column was being written before he made the address), he would have been doing something no SONA of his has had to do before: speak to a country that has stopped taking his word at face value. That, more than any new infrastructure pledge or economic target, is what makes this SONA crucial. It is not a report card. It is a reckoning, and one of the president’s own making.
Start with the number that hangs over everything: 5,500. That was the count of completed flood control projects Marcos boasted about in his 2024 SONA, offered as proof that his government had the country’s back against the rains. A year later, in his fourth SONA, he was forced to admit many of those projects were substandard, unfinished, or simply invented. What followed was not a minor embarrassment but one of the largest corruption exposés in recent Philippine history: Senate and House hearings, the resignation of Cabinet officials and of Marcos’s own cousin as House speaker, the arrest of a former senator over a ghost project and estimates from the finance secretary that P42.3 billion to P118.5 billion vanished from flood control funds every year since 2023. Hundreds of ghost projects have since been documented but no cases filed. Dozens of officials and contractors face charges, none done. This is not background noise to the fifth SONA; it is the story the fifth SONA exists to answer for. But he will claim a rosy bed and that he has not stopped working and yet nothing is moving except the propaganda that keeps spinning against the very taxpayers who have been supporting certain lifestyles.
Someone did say, “give the administration its due,” briefly. It ordered an audit, published a list of contractors, and backed prosecutions that produced real arrests rather than quiet settlements. A government determined to bury this scandal had every tool to do so. That it did not, at least not entirely, deserves acknowledgment. That act should also be viewed in the way they jail critics and muscle their way through.
But acknowledgment is not absolution, and this is where a critical accounting must begin, not end. The scheme metastasized inside agencies run by Marcos’ own appointees, funded by budgets his administration signed off on, sustained for years by a political class he leads and shares patronage networks with. It was his SONA that sold the fiction of 5,500 completed projects to the public in the first place. A president who “didn’t know,” as he has insisted, was either badly served by the people around him or chose not to look too closely at a system that had long helped his allies. Neither is much of a defense. And more than a year into the “reckoning,” recovery of stolen funds stays a rounding error against the losses. Many implicated officials still hold office. Convictions that will stick remain the exception, not the rule.
Then there is the price tag for even this partial cleanup, a price paid entirely by ordinary Filipinos, not by the officials who created the mess. The anti-corruption crackdown triggered a sharp pullback in public construction spending that alone shaved more than a full percentage point off GDP. First-quarter 2026 growth came in at a dismal 2.8 percent, the weakest since the pandemic low of 2021 and a collapse from 5.4 percent a year earlier. Layer on a Middle East-driven oil shock that pushed inflation to 7.2 percent, the highest since 2023, a peso languishing near record lows, and a national energy emergency declared in March, and you get an economy that is not merely slowing but stalling on multiple fronts at once, with the government having already downgraded its own growth target from as high as 7 percent to a much softer 5-6 percent. Even that revised number now looks like wishful thinking.
Filipinos are not waiting for a speech to tell them how to feel about this. They have already delivered their verdict. Marcos’ trust rating has cratered to a record-low 34 percent in the latest SWS survey, down from 64 percent when he took office, while Pulse Asia has him even lower, in the high 20s, with disapproval now the clear majority view. Some pollsters put his numbers lower still. Meanwhile Vice President Sara Duterte, despite an ongoing impeachment trial, holds trust levels nearly double his. That gap is not a coincidence; it is a referendum on competence and candor, and Marcos is losing it.
So, what is the state of the nation, honestly? It is a country paying the bill for a corruption scheme its own president once celebrated as a triumph, watching growth stall, jobs vanish from construction sites, and prices climb, while the people most responsible for the theft remain untouched. It is a public that has run out of patience for audits without convictions and speeches without receipts. The protests that filled the streets, the youth-led anger, the Senate hearings naming names, these are not signs of a functioning check on power working smoothly. They are signs of a public doing the accountability work the government has been too slow, too compromised, or too unwilling to do itself.
Marcos will certainly use this SONA to frame himself as the reformer who exposed the rot, rather than the president under whose watch it grew unchecked for years. Filipinos should not let him have it both ways. With two SONAs left and his lowest trust numbers on record, Marcos has no more room for another year of promises the ledger does not support. He does not need to convince the country he found a problem. He needs to show, in convictions secured and pesos recovered rather than in rhetoric, that he can solve one. On the evidence so far, the nation has every reason to keep its trust locked in the vault.
