‘…a voice that is finally heard must not be hushed—not by friendship, not by fear, not even by the fragile comfort of silence.’
BY opening a citizen-reporting portal on flood-control projects, the palace has made an unprecedented move, giving the people a voice to be heard. The president himself has vowed to listen and read the daily reports.
Not only is sumbongsapangulo.ph unprecedented, it is also a test of wills—the people’s will to speak up and the palace’s will to follow through. The portal’s power isn’t in its launch, but in what happens when the first uncomfortable truths begin to surface.
This is a call to arms, permitting people to use their constitutional right to speak out against what is wrong: the siphoning off of public funds from government infrastructure projects, especially those for flood control. This goes directly to the president’s ears, from the people, not just the whispers of vested interests.
The portal gives life to a promise: to catch private contractors colluding with erring public officials and hold them accountable.
That is the only way to make Sumbong sa Pangulo a viable exercise in collaboration between the people and the government—when reports lead to visible action, even against personal friends and political allies. It’s an exercise the president himself made plain could be “painful.”
Why this route? It’s simple. The locals themselves often know if flood control projects are flawed, mis-built, or entirely “ghost projects.” Their eyewitness accounts can be the nation’s best early-warning system against waste and corruption.
The feedback site is something people cannot ignore. How it will end up is up to them—either a watershed for citizen oversight or a digital suggestion box for the Palace to ignore.
The president has invited the people’s voice into the halls of power, giving credence to the public eye as a portal to arresting the political noise that hides the reality behind dysfunctional government-funded infrastructure.
Now he must prove the door stays open when the truth explodes and reveals what is hidden in plain sight: a collapsed bridge, cities inundated by floods for days, recently paved roads that literally melt at the onset of rains, and worse, projects that exist only on paper, what almost everyone calls ghost projects.
If the public eye is truly the people’s voice, then let it see everything, say everything, and be heard above the roar of politics.
In the end, the public eye is the people’s voice. And a voice that is finally heard must not be hushed—not by friendship, not by fear, not even by the fragile comfort of silence.
