Second of a series

SPOILER alert! I am a proud Davaoeño. So is Sen. Christopher “Bong” Go who I was acquainted with as Mayor Rodrigo Duterte’s aide. I am neither a contractor nor a recipient of any favors from either. Many in Davao hold him in esteem, yet these reflections — parts two and three of this series — speak from my own vantage: that of a political technocrat, observer and kibitzer, perhaps even a provocateur, attuned to the shifting undercurrents of our nation’s political landscape.

There are men who ascend by the gravity of meritocracy — and those who rise through the ranks by proximity. Bong Go belongs to the latter: an everyman catapulted into the stratosphere of statecraft, where the air is too rarefied for his origins. Once the unassuming errand boy in Rodrigo Duterte’s shadow, he now inhabits the marble corridors of the Senate — a chamber whose lexicon he mimics, whose gravitas he borrows, and whose rituals he mistakes for governance.

Locally, he was simply the boy who never left the mayor’s side — the photobomber who fetched folders, calmed tempers and carried the psychic burden of a volcanic patron. Duterte governed through explosive outbursts; Go governed through quiet resilience. Together they forged a culture of chaos and control that Davaoeños learned to accept. Go’s gift was utility, not vision; his strength was obedience, not insight.

When Duterte captured the presidency in 2016, Go’s loyalty adhered to him like a well-trained echo. As special assistant to the president, he turned service into devotion. His role was neither clerical nor Cabinet; it was sacerdotal. He guarded Duterte’s routines, rituals and confidences, the sole interpreter for a leader who prized unpredictability, communicating with primeval skills through text messages via an array of cell phones.

The birth of the political twin

In Malacañang, a strange alchemy occurred — a political parthenogenesis, a birth without separation. Duterte begot a son not by blood but molded by mimicry; an alter ego fashioned not merely to obey but to preserve, protect and perpetuate the original. The fusion produced a doppelganger: one man’s power reflected in another’s presence.

What Go lacked in pedigree, he made up for with proximity. In this fusion of identities, access became currency. Governance turned into choreography — standing beside power and translating its moods.

Thus emerged a new political species: the proxy sovereign, legitimized not by election or intellect, but by emotional inheritance. The Palace, once an institution, turned into a tableau of two men performing as one.

From service to syndicate

With access came opportunity. As early as 2007, while still in Davao’s City Hall, the Go family’s firms — CLTG and Alfrego Builders — began appearing in DPWH records. Their growth paralleled Duterte’s trajectory: first local, then regional and finally national after 2016. What began as small-town patronage evolved into a large-scale enterprise. The pattern of corruption took shape in the 2016 Navy frigate deal, a P16 billion test of moral elasticity. Whispers of Go’s meddling, redacted papers and hurried approvals served as a rehearsal for a grander act.

The Pharmally scandal that followed during the pandemic was not an anomaly but a sequel. The actors changed names; the script remained identical: loyalty repackaged as legitimacy, favoritism as efficiency.

Within this apparatus, Go’s genius lay not in innovation but in emulation. He replicated Duterte’s tone, his justifications and his disdain for scrutiny. His family’s companies, in turn, replicated the bureaucracy’s own appetite for rent-seeking. The personal became institutional. To examine Go’s metamorphosis is to study how the Philippine bureaucracy learns to mimic its masters — rewarding loyalty over logic, familiarity over function.

The illusion of humility

When Go finally entered the Senate in 2019, he carried with him not an agenda but an identity. His campaign slogan “Serbisyong Totoo” was less a promise than a preemptive defense: a warning that competence would never be the measure. In this chamber of rhetoric and legislation, he often appeared ill-equipped, reading prepared statements with the caution of a man afraid to mispronounce power. Yet the awkwardness worked; it reinforced the narrative of the humble servant, the man too good for guile.

Humility became his armor. The more he appeared unsophisticated, the more he seemed incorruptible. This inversion encapsulates the dichotomies in Philippine populism: ignorance masquerades as innocence, and loyalty supplants the rule of law. Each misstep on the Senate floor, each clumsy idiom, and each awkward defense of Duterte’s policies became an episode in a continuing telenovela of sincerity. What the public saw was not incompetence but authenticity, a dangerous illusion in a nation that mistakes personality for principle.

The machinery of myth

Behind the smile and selfies operated a vast machinery of myth-making. State-funded ads cast Go as the patron saint of Malasakit Centers — St. Raphael guarding the poor’s health. Distributing relief goods to fire-ravaged communities like a latter-day saint of disaster. Billboards thanked him for projects he had neither authored nor funded. TV spots blurred service with self-promotion. To the public, he was Duterte’s tender alter ego — the soft hand of an iron-fisted regime.

Yet every photo op concealed an equation: visibility equals viability. Each sack of rice, an investment; each relief operation a reminder of political debt. The spectacle of generosity became the lubricant of corruption. If power was a performance, Go had earned a Famas award.

The paradox of the proxy

The tragedy — and the satire — of Bong Go lies in this: he is simultaneously indispensable and unnecessary. Indispensable because his master required an echo; unnecessary because echoes do not create, they repeat. His career illustrates the pathology of delegated power, where loyalty mutates into liability and mediocrity becomes institutional policy.

When former senator Trillanes accused him of plunder and conflict of interest, the outrage was less about evidence than about etiquette. “How dare you accuse the loyal servant?” cried the faithful. Here, the Philippines reveals its chronic confusion between morality and emotion. The accusation threatened not just Go but the myth of the grateful subordinate — the archetype every political patron relies on to humanize his own tyranny.

It is too simple to cast Bong Go as a villain; he is also a symptom. Our politics breeds his kind: loyal errand boys turned senators, photogenic aides mistaken for statesmen. We reward obedience, not originality; service, not sense. He is not an accident but an outcome — the nation’s reflection in its own shallow mirror, proof that mediocrity, when dutiful enough, can pass for merit.

Epilogue: The shadow ascends

In the end, Bong Go’s ascent is less a triumph than a parable — a quiet testament to how power in the Philippines perpetuates itself through mimicry. The aide becomes a senator, the shadow becomes the sun, and the republic confuses recurrence with renaissance. His narrative serves as a poignant reminder that unbridled proximity to power inexorably metamorphoses into complicity with its excesses.

He remains, to this day, the perfect reflection of his master: loyal, useful, and tragically limited. And in that reflection, the nation sees its own predicament — a people content to worship the shadow because it fears the light.