19/03/2026
Soul of the Nation — This Week
From the AIJC Chair
Six columnists wrote this week about Iran, Duterte, coal, and our overseas workers. Each one mapped the crisis they were assigned. I read all of them and found myself asking the same question: what about the ground beneath?
Soul of the Nation — This Week
From the AIJC Chair | Year Eleven | March 16–22, 2026
Twenty-one nautical miles. That is the width of the Strait of Hormuz. That is the width of the chokepoint that moves the barrel price, doubles the tanker insurance, and adjusts the Philippine pump within seventy-two hours. We have rehearsed this reflex since 1973 — the Middle East convulses, the government reaches for the subsidy, the buffer fund, the appeal for calm. These are the instruments of a country that has accepted its position as a price-taker in a system it did not build and has never attempted to redesign.
Beneath our own territorial waters, in the Reed Bank, sits the Sampaguita gas field. An estimated 3.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. A basin we claim under UNCLOS. A claim adjudicated in our favor by the 2016 Arbitral Award. Undeveloped. Not because the gas is inaccessible. Not because the technology is unavailable. Because the decision to treat our own seabed as a sovereign energy asset — to develop it, defend the development, and connect it to the national grid — has not been made.
The lesson Hormuz is delivering to the world is the lesson the West Philippine Sea has been delivering to us for a generation. Energy security is not a supply-chain problem. It is a sovereignty problem. A nation that imports its energy when it possesses its own is not unlucky. It is unserious.
Every peso spent on fuel subsidy is a peso that confesses we have chosen to manage dependence rather than build independence. The Aksyon Fund is not preparation. It is a receipt for the preparation we did not do.
The question is not how to cushion the next price shock. The question is why we have a price shock at all when the gas is under our own water, the law is on our side, and the only missing variable is the decision to act.
The Architecture That Guarantees the Crisis
The impeachment of the Vice President will consume the nation's attention for months. The commentary will track the votes, the coalitions, the procedural maneuvers. All of it will be accurate. None of it will touch the structural question the spectacle is exposing.
The 1987 Constitution permits a Vice President to be elected on a separate mandate from the President. This is not a minor procedural detail. It is a design choice that embeds into the executive branch the possibility — in some cycles the certainty — of radical misalignment at the highest level of government. The President governs with a mandate. The Vice President waits with a different one. The system does not require them to agree on anything. It does not even require them to speak.
What we are witnessing is not a crisis produced by one family's ambition. It is a crisis produced by a constitutional architecture that treats the executive as two separate bets placed by the same electorate on the same day, with no mechanism to ensure coherence between them. The framers of 1987, understandably preoccupied with preventing the concentration of power, distributed it in a way that periodically guarantees paralysis — or worse, the kind of internecine combat that transforms governance into a succession war conducted in real time, with the cabinet as the battlefield and legislation as collateral.
The impeachment will proceed. It will succeed or it will not. Either outcome leaves the architecture intact. The crisis is not who holds the office. The crisis is how the office is built.
Until that question is entered — not amended in the margins but reconsidered at the foundation — we will continue to treat the person and leave the structure undisturbed. The nation will produce this crisis again. It has produced it before. The constitution does not prevent the collision. It schedules it.
The Grid Is the Chokepoint
If the Strait of Hormuz teaches that concentration is vulnerability, the Philippine power grid is the domestic proof.
Eighty percent of the country's electricity flows through a transmission system operated by a single private concession.
The generating capacity is concentrated among a handful of Independent Power Producers whose commercial arrangements with distribution utilities are opaque to the public that pays the resulting tariff. Coal accounts for over half of the generation mix — not because coal is the best option, but because coal integrates most comfortably into a centralized model that rewards large capital, long contracts, and the kind of regulatory capture that makes alternatives structurally difficult to deploy.
The renewable energy conversation, as it is currently conducted, misses the point. The question is not coal versus solar. The question is centralized versus distributed.
A national grid designed to move power from a few large plants to millions of passive consumers is a chokepoint architecture — as vulnerable to disruption, capture, and rent-seeking as any shipping lane controlled by a single strait. The alternative is not a slogan. It is an engineering reality already deployed in countries with less sun, less wind, and less coastline than ours.
A barangay in Kalinga that generates, stores, and manages its own electricity is not a customer. It is a sovereign node. It does not petition the grid. It is the grid — at the scale where the community can see it, govern it, and benefit from it without an intermediary whose profit depends on the community's dependence.
The government's energy plan speaks of renewable targets — 35% by 2030, 50% by 2040. These targets are meaningless if achieved within the same centralized architecture. Replacing coal with solar at utility scale, fed through the same transmission monopoly, governed by the same opaque contracting regime, delivers cleaner electrons through the same chokepoint. The vulnerability does not change. Only the fuel does.
Energy sovereignty is not a generation problem. It is a governance problem. And governance begins with the question no energy plan has yet asked: who owns the electrons between the panel and the household?
The Pilots the Nation Calls Passengers
Four hundred thousand Filipino seafarers serve on international vessels at any given moment. A quarter of the global maritime workforce. When the Strait of Hormuz narrows and the world's shipping wobbles, the hands on the wheel — in significant and measurable proportion — are Filipino.
Two hundred thousand Filipino nurses and healthcare workers are deployed across the Middle East. When the region's health systems absorb the strain of conflict, the hands administering care — in hospitals from Riyadh to Dubai to Doha — are Filipino.
The national conversation frames these workers as vulnerable dependents — to be counted, evacuated, repatriated, and compensated from an emergency fund. The framing is not wrong. It is radically incomplete.
A nation whose workers are essential to the operating systems of global shipping and Gulf-state healthcare possesses something most countries would treat as a strategic asset: indispensability. The Filipino mariner does not merely work on the ship. He is the reason the ship moves. The Filipino nurse does not merely staff the hospital. She is the reason the hospital functions. In any serious diplomatic calculus, this is leverage — the kind that translates into bilateral negotiating power, labor-standards enforcement, and the capacity to set terms rather than accept them.
No Philippine administration has treated the global Filipino workforce as a diplomatic instrument. Every administration has treated it as a remittance source — to be protected when endangered, celebrated when convenient, and otherwise left to negotiate its own terms in labor markets where the individual worker has no power and the sending state declines to exercise the collective power the workforce represents.
The OFW is not a passenger on the global system. He is its crew. The nation that produced him has not yet learned to see what he carries — not only the remittance, but the leverage the remittance has been subsidizing the government's failure to use.
The Ground Beneath
Four subjects. One substrate.
The seabed we claim but do not develop. The constitution that distributes the executive mandate into incoherence. The grid that concentrates power — electrical and political — in architectures designed to serve the few. The workforce we deploy globally and treat domestically as a revenue line rather than a strategic asset.
Each is treated, in the ordinary week's commentary, as a separate crisis requiring a separate response. They are not separate. They are four expressions of a single national condition: a country that possesses its own resources — energy, constitutional authority, distributed capacity, global human capital — and has not yet organized itself to exercise sovereignty over any of them.
The Strait of Hormuz did not create this condition. It illuminated it. The impeachment did not create it. It performed it. The grid did not create it. It profits from it. The OFW did not create it. He survives it — and sends the remittance home to a nation that has learned to live on what its people earn abroad rather than on what its territory holds and its institutions could, if restructured, command.
The ground is not barren. It has never been barren. What it requires is not more commentary on the surface events. What it requires is the decision — institutional, constitutional, infrastructural — to build on what we already possess.
The surface was mapped long ago. The ground is still waiting.
Mel Velasco Velarde is Chair of AIJC. Soul of the Nation appears weekly.
