There is something grotesquely familiar about how Philippine politics works in moments of crisis. The louder the rhetoric about accountability, the quieter the real beneficiaries move in the shadows. As the country hurtles toward a potential double impeachment spectacle, one truth is becoming harder to ignore: the political chaos is not a threat to corruption. It is its opportunity.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the strange rehabilitation of Zaldy Co, a figure widely identified by government investigators as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the scandal-ridden flood-control projects that drained public coffers while leaving communities underwater. In a functioning system, he would be rushing to clear his name in a court of law. Instead, he is being floated by the Duterte camp as a potential “star witness” against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

It is a maneuver so shameless it almost demands admiration for its audacity.

The logic is as old as Philippine politics itself. Turn an accused plunderer into a political asset. Reframe a suspect as a savior. Transform a liability into leverage. In a season where impeachment arithmetic matters more than prosecutorial evidence, Co’s alleged crimes suddenly become negotiable, even forgettable, so long as he can help bring down a rival camp.

This is not accountability. This is hostage-taking, Philippine-style.

For corrupt politicians and compromised officials within the Department of Public Works and Highways, the current crisis is a godsend. While Congress is consumed by impeachment chatter, senators posture for camera time, and the public’s attention is hijacked by elite infighting, the flood control mess quietly recedes from the headlines. Subpoenas stall. Committees lose quorum. Prosecutors hesitate. Investigators are reassigned. Paper trails grow cold.

Political noise becomes legal insulation.

The incentives are brutally clear. If the system is busy trying to decapitate a president or a vice president, it has little energy left to pursue contractors, fixers, and lawmakers who drained infrastructure budgets dry. Chaos, in this context, is not dysfunction. It is strategy.
And then there is the Duterte clique.

It is almost comical—if the stakes were not so tragic—that a political faction whose leading figures have themselves been charged with graft and corruption now poses as a moral tribunal against alleged wrongdoing in the current administration. These are not reformers. These are operators. Veterans of transactional politics who made fortunes defending grafters, shielding cronies, and weaponizing institutions for personal and factional survival.

They know the game because they wrote the rules.

Positioning Zaldy Co as a star witness is not an act of civic heroism. It is a bargaining move. It signals a likely backroom arrangement: protection in exchange for testimony, immunity in exchange for destabilization, and silence in exchange for survival. If this alliance hardens, it will not be because the Duterte camp suddenly discovered a conscience. It will be because both sides found mutual advantage in burying the flood control scandal under the rubble of an impeachment war.

This is what elite collusion looks like in real time.

The most disturbing part is not that this is happening. It is that it was entirely predictable.

In Philippine politics, corruption rarely dies. It merely changes patrons. One administration’s indicted contractor becomes the next faction’s prized witness. One camp’s “most benefited” suspect becomes another camp’s strategic ally. Ideology disappears. Principles evaporate. What remains is a cold calculus of power: who can help whom survive the next political storm?

Meanwhile, the people are left with the bill.

They are the ones who paid for flood-control projects that failed. They are the ones whose homes were submerged as billions vanished into padded contracts. They are the ones now watching as the man allegedly enriched by that very scandal positions himself not as a defendant but as a kingmaker.

And where, exactly, is the state in all this?

If Zaldy Co refuses to submit to justice, what does that say about the government’s seriousness in pursuing him? If he can openly flirt with one political camp while being investigated by another, what message does that send to every other contractor and politician who has ever stolen a peso from the public?

It tells them this: hold out long enough, and the politics will save you.

This is the corrosive genius of Philippine corruption. It does not merely exploit weak institutions; it weaponizes political crises to evade them. It does not fear impeachment; it thrives on it. It does not flee chaos; it orchestrates it.

And so the country finds itself in a bitterly ironic moment. While politicians posture about the moral high ground and constitutional duty, the very figures accused of looting the state are quietly repositioning themselves as arbiters of truth. While factions accuse one another of betrayal and abuse of power, they are allegedly climbing into bed with the same contractor whose name has become synonymous with the flood-control debacle.

There is no reformist camp here. There is only a rotating cast of survivors.

In the end, the greatest scandal may not be the flood control mess itself or even the looming impeachment wars. It may be the normalization of this political obscenity: a system in which the accused can shop for protectors, in which political clans trade immunity for testimony, and in which justice is not blind but negotiable.

This is not a republic on trial. It is a republic being auctioned.

As long as shamelessness remains a viable political strategy, the next Zaldy Co is already waiting in the wings, confident that when his turn comes, he too will find a crisis large enough to hide behind.