24/10/2025
YAYAM’s Editorial | HOW DUTERTE DESTROYED THE PHILIPPINES
24th October 2025
There are leaders who build a nation and there are those who break it apart piece by piece. Former President Rodrigo Roa Duterte belongs to the latter. He entered Malacañang promising change but left behind a country broken in spirit, stained in blood, and drowning in corruption. Beneath the swagger and sound bites lay the slow decay of our institutions. He did not fix the system. He corrupted it even more and called it governance.
The so-called war on drugs became a war on the poor. Thousands were killed without trial, without mercy, without accountability. Mothers buried sons. Children grew up fatherless. Police officers were rewarded instead of investigated. And when human rights groups called for justice, Duterte mocked them on live television. That is how a culture of impunity was born in our country — one kill at a time, one lie at a time, until we all became numb.
He also opened the door to POGOs that turned parts of Metro Manila into havens for crime, prostitution, human trafficking, and money laundering. Foreign syndicates thrived while law enforcement looked the other way. The promise of revenue became an excuse for lawlessness. The moral fabric of the nation was pawned for dirty money that never truly reached the people. What was once the Pearl of the Orient was reduced to a playground for crooks and gamblers.
He abused the law by taking shortcuts and silencing dissent. From his withdrawal from the International Criminal Court to his public instructions to “shoot them dead,” Duterte turned legality into a weapon. The rule of law was replaced by the rule of fear. Institutions that were supposed to check abuses of power were tamed, cowed, or co-opted. Even the flood control scam that we are uncovering now grew silently during his time because oversight was weakened, and corruption became the new normal.
Power corrupts absolutely when those meant to check it become its shield. Former Ombudsman Samuel Martires proved this truth. He served not as the people’s watchdog but as the protector of the powerful. His latest act erased all doubt. Just recently disclosed, he secretly overturned the 2016 ruling of former Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales that dismissed Senator Joel Villanueva from public service and perpetually disqualified him from holding any government post. No announcement. No explanation. No transparency. A decision done quietly, like a thief in the night, undoing years of hard work for accountability. That is how justice dies — not with a bang, but with a whisper from the very office sworn to uphold it.
Duterte also stopped local governments from accepting turnover of completed national projects, effectively removing community-level inspection and validation. Because of that, ghost projects and unfinished infrastructures multiplied. Contractors collected, politicians bragged, and the public got nothing but floods and frustration. That single decision became one of the roots of today’s trillion-peso flood control scam. It was not just negligence. It was design. A system that rewarded deceit instead of service.
Rodrigo Roa Duterte will go down in history not as a strongman, but as the man who broke the spine of our democracy. He made killing normal, corruption invisible, and injustice acceptable. He destroyed our country by teaching an entire generation that power is above the law and that fear is more effective than truth. But the tide is turning. The lies are being exposed. The ghosts of his governance are being brought to light. And the people he once terrorized are finally finding their voice.
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YAYAM’s Editorial — fearless commentary, for country, truth, and good governance.
Yayam Dizon
