ON Nov. 30, another wave of indignation is set to sweep across the archipelago. This is no ordinary protest, but a multisectoral convergence grandly baptized as the “Trillion Peso March,” named after the staggering fund transfer of people’s money to the pockets of thieves. The figure may be hyperbolic, but so is the scale of the corruption.

The organizers, an unlikely constellation of civil-society groups, clergy, leftist blocs, student alliances and the ghostly remnants of post-Marcos 1 crusaders, are attempting what passes as national unity: getting everyone equally furious at the same crooks at the same time.

This show of collective disgust comes on the heels of the now-infamous aborted INC three-day rally fiasco of Nov. 16 to 18. What was supposed to be a pristine, apolitical prayer gathering mutated into a partisan circus once overeager allies injected calls for President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to resign — punctuated by Sen. Imee Marcos’ tell-all on her brother’s propensity to get high on coke — calling “Ading Bonget” an addict. Nice show of filial devotion. “Ka Eddie Boy” and the INC leadership, usually masters at crowd choreography, found themselves outmaneuvered. The Duterte-aligned troops — forever on the lookout for a vacancy at the top — seized the moment, beating their drums for Vice President Sara Duterte to swoop in as the savior-in-waiting. Unity, as always, died on arrival.

Reclaiming the narrative

This coming mobilization attempts a hard reset. Its mission: to drag the corruption scandals back to center stage, strip the euphemisms, and name the culprits with the clarity of a medical autopsy. Gone are the polite calls for “reform” and “transparency.” In their place demands to hold specific individuals accountable, to shame an Ombudsman widely caricatured as a Marcos loyalist, and to pressure the criminal justice system into actually moving — preferably forward. This is not activism for the faint-hearted; it is a civic intervention for a government that appears to have overdosed on its own impunity.

The shameless perpetrators

By now, even the mildly attentive can recite the cast of characters in this sprawling corruption saga. The two chambers of Congress — ever united when the loot is large enough — have conspired with favored contractors (the Discaya network being only the best-known specimen) and key bureaucrats inside the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH). Secretaries, undersecretaries, district engineers — an entire assembly line of rent-seekers — perfected the formula: inflate the budget by dubious “insertions,” skim from the contracts, parading their “kabits” with the spoils on Facebook.

And as every whistleblower reminds us, this is just the tip of the iceberg, which implies the unseen remainder is large enough to sink a country, not just a ship.

The recent resignations of Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin — the “Little President” — and Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman, guardian of the national purse, have only deepened suspicions. Their exit raises the question no one wants to ask aloud: Was the president merely negligent, or was he complicit? Detractors insist he lacks the cognitive wattage to mastermind a racket of this scale; skeptics counter that stupidity has never been a reliable defense in organized crime.

Which leads us to former House speaker Martin Romualdez, his congressional lieutenants like Zaldy Co, and a cabal whose members scuttle around inside the bicam like gnomes guarding the national ATM.

The great unraveling

As in every mafiosi drama, the syndicate is now eating itself alive. Legislators, contractors and bureaucrats are elbowing one another for a slot in the witness protection program, eager to secure the coveted status of “least guilty.” Some hope for lighter sentences; others dream of keeping part of their loot, because in the Philippines, even repentance comes with a negotiation.

The Trillion Peso March is thus not just a protest — it is a reckoning. A reminder that even in a country desensitized by scandal, there comes a point when the public finally says: Enough. Return what you stole — or the streets will collect it for you.

Where do we go from here

I remain skeptical that the Trillion Peso March — grand in name, righteous in intention — will deliver what our wounded nation now demands: genuine accountability and transparency, the resignation and removal of top officials implicated in wholesale corruption, and the swift, nonselective prosecution of bureaucrats, cabinet secretaries, senators and congressmen who helped engineer our national decay. At its heart, this movement seeks nothing less than a reform of governance itself. Yet the skepticism is warranted. We have marched before. We have demanded before. And the system, hydra-like, grows back with new heads and the same putrid smell.

Our political polarization complicates the picture further. One bloc cries, “BBM resign!” — an appeal drowned out by the specter of constitutional succession: the ascent of Vice President Duterte. This sector recoils at the idea, wary of inheriting the political DNA of a father whose Pharmally scandal remains one of the darkest emblems of pandemic plunder. The vice president herself has yet to fully answer for the alleged misuse of her confidential funds during her stint as education secretary. When the guardians of the public purse cannot account for the coins in their own pockets, one wonders what kind of succession we are really talking about.

A quandary

The uncomfortable truth is that a Ferdinand Marcos Jr. resignation and a Sara Duterte assumption would not heal the Republic’s long-festering wounds. The rot is systemic — embedded in the architecture of our politics, nourished by political dynasties, shielded by impunity, and enabled by a bureaucracy that has learned to survive not by serving the public, but by serving the powerful. Replacing the figure at the top is cosmetic; it is a haircut for a patient who needs organ transplant. How do we deal with the senators, congressmen and career bureaucrats who constitute the machinery of decay? Histrionic top billing changes will not purge a culture entrenched across generations.

The ghosts of our revolution

As the organizers of the Trillion Peso March attempt to mobilize a fractured populace, a parallel conversation simmers quietly in the streets. It is whispered more in longing than in strategy: the possibility — however remote — of a military component emerging, as happened twice in our modern history. EDSA 1 swept away a corrupt dictatorship but replaced it with a flawed democracy that enshrined political dynasties and partnered with oligarchs protected by the 1987 Constitution. EDSA 2 toppled another corrupt regime only to install a successor later jailed for plunder and ultimately freed. Both uprisings promised deliverance; both reproduced the traditional politics that continue to maim our institutions.

Today, many Filipinos — exhausted, disgusted, politically homeless — find themselves hoping, perhaps naively, for a deus ex machina: an intervention outside the narrow binary of the president and vice president, the two figures perched atop our totem pole of corruption. It is a yearning born of desperation rather than ideology, an appeal to forces unseen because the forces seen have failed us so completely.

Where we go from here remains unclear. Yet one truth stands firm: protests, resignations and successions are hollow unless the architecture of impunity — every beam, bolt, and shadow — is dismantled, redesigned and rebuilt. Without that, we merely pace our own cage. We need alternatives — real ones.