*Dr. Rodolfo John Ortiz Teope, PhD, EdD, DM
When I was a boy, I would sit by the wooden table in our small house and watch my late mother, Juliana Castillo Ortiz Teope, count the few bills she had earned that week. The light was dim, the air quiet, and the sound of her pen scratching the paper was the only thing that filled the room. She would whisper to herself as she wrote: one column for food, another for school, another for medicine, and sometimes, if there was enough, a little for the church.
Then she would look at me and say, “John-John Anak, when you budget, you are not counting money—you are counting sacrifices.”
That memory has never left me. She taught me that every peso has a purpose, and every purpose must be honest. When I look now at the proposed ₱6.793 trillion national budget for 2026, I remember her trembling hand dividing coins that seemed too few for too many needs. The government today faces the same dilemma she did back then: how to make what we have truly reach those who need it most.
But unlike my mother, who never cheated her own table, our government has too often been betrayed by greed.
The ₱5.05 trillion in expected revenue is the product of honest work—taxes from jeepney drivers who drive until midnight, teachers who buy their own supplies, nurses who endure fatigue to care for strangers, and farmers who till the earth under a burning sun. Yet between what the government earns and what it plans to spend lies a ₱1.74 trillion deficit, a gap not only of money but of morality.
Because no matter how big the budget is, corruption always eats first.
I often think of how my mother handled money with such reverence, as if every coin carried a soul. “You cannot feed your family,” she said, “if you allow the dishonest to eat ahead.” That lesson applies painfully to our nation today. Every peso lost to graft is not an abstract figure—it is a stolen meal, a canceled scholarship, a hospital bed that remains empty.
We read of ghost projects and padded contracts with the same exhaustion we feel during brownouts: familiar, frustrating, but no longer shocking. Corruption in the Philippines has become so normalized that people treat it as part of governance, not a crime against it. Yet corruption does not just steal from the government—it starves the nation.
The farmer’s irrigation that never came, the bridge that collapsed months after inauguration, the overpriced medicine that expired in storage—these are not random failures; they are symptoms of a government that has forgotten how to count with conscience.
If my mother were alive to see this, she would probably sigh and say, “Anak, they have learned to count money but not mercy.”
In every administration, there are those who pretend that efficiency can exist without honesty. But my mother taught me that budgeting is never just about arithmetic—it is about justice. The national budget must carry both math and morality, because numbers alone cannot heal a hungry nation.
The 2026 budget promises much: investments in education, healthcare, infrastructure, and defense, including funds to protect our sovereignty in the West Philippine Sea. These are noble goals. But noble intentions mean nothing if money never reaches its destination. Patriotism cannot coexist with plunder; defending our territory means nothing if we cannot defend our integrity.
A ₱6.793 trillion budget can either build a nation or bury it in debt. It depends on whose hands hold the pen and whose conscience guides it. When the honest are silenced and the corrupt are rewarded, we lose more than money—we lose our soul.
My mother’s ledger was small, but her heart was immense. She spent not what she wanted, but what we needed. And when she finally balanced her tiny budget, she smiled—not because there was plenty, but because nothing was wasted, and nothing was stolen. There was dignity in that kind of poverty, because it was lived with integrity.
That is what I wish for our country—to find dignity again in how we spend.
The 2026 budget is more than a plan; it is a mirror. It will show whether we are still a nation guided by conscience or merely a crowd ruled by convenience.
If those in power could remember the lesson my mother taught by candlelight—that budgeting is an act of love, not of greed—then perhaps the Philippines would finally rise from poverty, not because it became richer, but because it became cleaner.
A country does not starve because it is poor. It starves because those who eat first never leave enough for the rest.
So as this government signs the ₱6.793 trillion budget into law, may it remember the faces of those who eat last—the laborers, the teachers, the mothers like Juliana Teope who stretch a single peso into tomorrow. Let this not be another feast for the powerful, but a fair meal for the nation.
Because a budget without conscience is a banquet of betrayal.
And when corruption eats first, the nation always eats last.
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