*Dr. Rodolfo John Ortiz Teope, PhD, EdD
I was sitting in my home office room while my daughter Juliana Rizalhea was busy in her Taekwondo training on the floor stretching her legs, the television humming in the background, when the spectacle began. It was supposed to be a hearing—a solemn exercise of truth and accountability. But as I watched the cameras zoom in on the so-called witness, clutching notarized statements like weapons, I felt the air change. Something was wrong. The words rolling off his tongue did not carry the weight of honesty; they carried the stench of fabrication.
I leaned closer to the screen, half in disbelief, half in anger. Here it was again—the old trick of Philippine politics. Falsified documents paraded as gospel truth, testimonies rehearsed in backrooms now dressed up as revelations under oath. It wasn’t the pursuit of justice I was seeing; it was a cheap play, staged for cameras, orchestrated for political ends.
And this is what pains me most: every Filipino wants the true mastermind of the flood control scandal to be jailed. We all want accountability for the billions stolen and the lives destroyed by ghost projects and substandard works. But not like this—not through fake evidence and planted witnesses. For to use forgery in the name of justice is to mock justice itself. It does not jail the guilty; it frees them. It does not expose the truth; it buries it beneath layers of deceit.
As the session dragged on, I could not help but ask myself: how many times have we seen this before? How many investigations have been poisoned by forged papers, notarized lies, and the prostitution of truth? How many institutions have been dragged down, not by evidence, but by the fabrication of it?
And the ones who preside over these lies—they wear barong, they carry titles, they speak the language of law. Yet what they truly are, I realized, are forgers. Not legislators, not truth-seekers, but forgers in barong. They manufacture deceit the way others draft bills, and they do it with the confidence of men who know they will get away with it.
Sitting there, I felt the weight of betrayal. Our democracy was not being defended; it was being defiled, live on national television. What struck me most was not only the brazenness of the forgery, but the silence in the room—the nods, the complicit stares, the absence of outrage. Lies were being legitimized by the very people sworn to protect the truth.
This is the rot that has taken root in our politics. It is not just about corruption anymore; it is about the normalization of deceit. A forged paper today, a falsified witness tomorrow—until, one day, truth itself becomes irrelevant. And when that day comes, what will be left of our democracy?
As the hearing ended, I switched off the television. But the image of that witness, clutching his notarized lies, stayed with me. It was not just a scene from the Senate floor—it was a mirror held up to our nation. A reminder that unless we demand accountability, unless we spit out the forgers who rot in their barongs, we will continue to be held hostage by lies.
Yes, we want the guilty jailed. But we want them jailed
through truth—not through fabrications. Only then can justice be real. Only
then can democracy survive.
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