19/09/2025
In a nation where public trust is too often a casualty of power, the spectacle of Speaker Martin Romualdez stepping down from the fourth-highest office in the land is more than just a headlineâit is a rare act of political restraint.
Romualdezâs resignation, even as accusations swirl around the flood-control budget, forces a difficult question onto the national stage: if delicadezaâan old-fashioned sense of honor and proprietyâstill has meaning in Philippine politics, who else will live up to it?
Romualdezâs record is not without blemish in the court of public opinion.
Critics have sought to tie him to the alleged misuse of billions in flood-control funds, a tempting narrative in a country battered by an average of 21 typhoons a year.
Yet, despite the rumors, no evidence has emerged that he pocketed a single peso.
Congress allocates budgets; it does not lay concrete or award contracts.
The Department of Public Works and Highways, not the Speaker, executes those projects.
To conflate appropriation with corruption is to blur the lines of accountabilityâprecisely the confusion that allows real wrongdoing to hide in the shadows.
And still, Romualdez relinquished the gavel.
No guilty man, the argument goes, would surrender such an influential perch voluntarily.
His resignation is an act almost unheard of in the rough-and-tumble world of Philippine politics, where the instinct is to cling to office until the last vote is counted or the last warrant served.
It is also a quiet rebuke to those who accuse him of self-preservation: if he were merely protecting himself, he would have stayed put.
Now contrast that with Vice President Sara Duterte, who faces a gathering storm of her own.
Allegations of questionable intelligence funds, disputed disbursements as Education Secretary, and the lingering violence associated with her fatherâs presidency form a catalogue of controversies far more concrete than the whispers do***ng Romualdez.
Yet she remains firmly in office, dismissing calls to step aside while an impeachment case makes its way through the political machinery.
The comparison is as uncomfortable as it is instructive. Romualdezâs gesture does not prove innocenceâonly a willingness to let investigations proceed without the gravitational pull of high office. Duterteâs refusal does not prove guiltâonly a determination to fight from within the fortress of power.
But in a democracy battered by storms both literal and political, the symbolism matters. It invites citizens to ask who embodies the humility of service and who embodies the entitlement of survival.
None of this excuses the systemic failures that allow floodwaters, real and metaphorical, to rise unchecked.
The Philippines needs institutions strong enough to hold every officialâRomualdez, Duterte, or anyone elseâto the same standard of evidence and consequence.
But symbolism is not nothing. By stepping down, Romualdez has raised the bar.
The question now is whether Vice President Duterte, confronted with allegations far less ephemeral, will meet it or continue to test how long power can outlast public patience.
In the end, delicadeza is not a relic. It is a challenge. Romualdez has accepted it.
Sara Duterte has yet to answer.
- JLB
