President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. chose to devote his 80-minute address to a discussion not of the Filipino forest but of the trees in that forest.
Like its predecessors, the 1987 Constitution requires the President of the Philippines to deliver, before Congress, at the start of every Congressional session, a State of the Nation Address (SONA). In 2025 President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. complied with that Constitutional requirement on July 28.
Given that it is supposed to provide a perceptive, comprehensive and accurate picture of the state of the nation, the Chief Executive’s SONA is regarded with a high degree of expectancy by the people of this country. They expected President Marcos to deliver a once-a-year address that would bespeak vision, a national strategy, an overall framework for progress during the second half of the Marcos Presidency.
The Filipino people were sorely disappointed on July 28. In what was undoubtedly the least consequential of his four SONAs, Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. chose to devote his 80-minute address to a discussion not of the Filipino forest but of the trees in that forest.
BBM – the initials by which President Marcos is widely known – spoke to the Filipino people about the corruption associated with flood control projects, about the deficit in the number of classrooms, about the expansion in the coverage by the Universal Health Care Program (Philhealth) and about the impending return of the Love Buses of yore, among other governmental-operations matters. In short, he discussed trees, not a forest.
This is not to say that the President should not discuss, in his SONA, the accomplishments of his administration. The present administration, like its predecessors, has a right to remind the Filipino people of what it has accomplished. But such reminding should be done selectively; only the government’s major accomplishments and breakthroughs should be included. The recital of accomplishments should not resemble the reading of a laundry list.
A SONA is a very special address. That is why it is a once-a-year speech delivered to the elected representatives of the Filipino people assembled in joint session. The framers of the Constitution could very well have dispensed with the annual-address duty of the Chief Executive; after all, the President communicates with the people constantly the course of a year, through press conferences and speeches before specific groups. But the framers wanted the President to face the Filipino people once a year, in a grand setting, and say to them “My countrymen, this is where our country is today”.
Unfortunately, the President’s message is diluted or lost altogether when many other operational details – Love Buses, Philhealth benefits, flood control projects, computers for teachers, etcs. – are thrown at the Filipino people along with more consequential information. They get lost in the forest among all the trees.
The making of a SONA is the collective work of staff members of numerous government offices – Cabinet departments, agencies and corporations – who send to Malacañang materials regarding their offices’ operations during the preceding year. These materials are then joined together to form the body of the SONA. The President’s speechwriters and the Presidential Communications Office (PCO) then collate the materials and convert them into a speech fit for the President to deliver as a SONA. The big challenge for the speechwriters and the PCO folk is to provide a unifying theme for the SONA and prevent it from sounding like a laundry-list-like recitation of government activities during the preceding year.
The Filipino people look to every year’s SONA for a vision of what they can expect in the years immediately ahead, not a business-as-usual discourse by the Chief Executive. They want to know, for instance, whether the Philippines will finally achieve middle-middle-income status in 2026 and what measures the government intends to take to ensure that that elusive goal is attained.
In line with the foregoing discussion, State of the Nation Address is a misnomer. The President’s annual speech to Congress is more appropriately called the State and Prospects of the Nation Address.
(llagasjessa@yahoo.com)
