When someone is drowning, you do not ask why they never learned how to swim. You ask who threw them into the water in the first place.
Yet every time floods tear through Filipino communities, the “bobotante” blame game resurfaces — turning voters into scapegoats for a crisis far bigger than their individual choices.
Among the posts that sparked the conversation were those of Gabe Pineda, a content creator whose Facebook page has more than 169,000 followers.
On that same page, he wrote, “Ang mga baha na nararanasan natin ay resulta ng pinagsama-samang mga panahon na pilit tayong bumoboto ng mga pulitikong wala naman talagang pake sa’tin. Tapos magnanakaw pa.”
In another post, he stated, “Rekla-reklamo kayo sa baha tapos i-boboto niyo puro sangkot sa flood control. Nalilito nanaman kayo eh!”
There is nothing inherently wrong with questioning how people vote. Voters have agency, and political choices have consequences. But when communities are submerged and livelihoods are destroyed, reducing the catastrophe to a battle of political colors narrows it into a contest over who was right, who voted better, and who deserves blame.
That is precisely the kind of fight a failing political system is designed to have. While Filipinos argue over who is to blame, attention is pulled away from the institutions, interests, and people with the actual power to shape the conditions we are drowning in.
This narrative also assumes that every Filipino enters an election with the same freedom, information, security, and material conditions. But the state itself produces those inequalities.
For some, politics can be an exercise in principle. For a voter in constant survival mode, politics can also be entangled with employment, food, healthcare, local patronage, debt, promised assistance, and immediate survival.
The system keeps people poor, dependent, and politically disempowered because a population forced to rely on patronage is easier to control than one with the time and resources to scrutinize those in power. It then condemns them for making “ignorant” choices.
That does not make every political choice correct. It means those choices must be understood within the conditions that produced them — not weaponized against the people who had the least power to change those conditions.
The “bobotante” mindset refuses that complexity. It turns a structural crisis into an individual failure, which is convenient for those who would rather have Filipinos interrogating one another than interrogating the system that keeps them vulnerable.
And this is where people like Gabe Pineda should not become the villains either. The frustration behind these sentiments is real. So is the anger at voters who repeatedly support politicians accused of corruption or incompetence.
But when that anger is redirected toward fellow Filipinos, it serves a system that has every reason to keep the public fighting each other instead of looking upward.
The poor are left dependent on politicians for assistance and patronage. The middle class is left furious at the poor for continuing to vote for them. One side is made dependent; the other is made resentful. Both are given someone else to blame.
And while that fight continues, the people with the greatest power to change the conditions producing the crisis are spared accountability.
If we want to know who is truly responsible, let’s look first at who controls the conditions that the ballot cannot.
Look at the government.
Flood-control projects alone should be enough to demand answers. Between July 2022 and May 2025, the government funded 9,855 flood-control projects worth more than ₱545 billion.
Yet communities remain vulnerable, because the billions meant to protect communities are swallowed by corruption.
This is bureaucrat capitalism at its ugliest: a government that turns public office into personal opportunity and public infrastructure into another avenue for swelling their pockets. And so, the mechanisms meant to protect communities are turned into mechanisms of profit
But the damage does not stop at stolen funds.
Look at the land.
Look at the impact of environmental plunder. Mountains are torn apart, forests are cleared, waterways and coastlines are converted, and land is reshaped — while environmental destruction is treated as an acceptable cost of doing business.
Look at the garbage, too.
Corporations continue flooding the market with disposable packaging, simply because producing more means earning more. And yet we are told to blame the person who threw a sachet into a canal or the household who failed to segregate — shrinking an industrial-scale crisis into an individual’s fault.
And look beyond our borders, because imperialism is part of the indictment.
The Philippines does not decide what to extract, what to build, or whose interests development should serve in isolation. Foreign capital and geopolitical interests have long shaped our resources, trade, infrastructure, and strategic priorities.
From the environmental scars left by former United States bases in Clark and Subic to contemporary military and economic arrangements, Philippine territory has repeatedly been treated as something to be accessed, developed, and profited from.
And imperialism does not operate without local accomplices. It thrives in a government that puts foreign interests before public welfare.
These are the machineries that we should be angry at.
Now, look at your fellow Filipino standing in the same floodwater as you. Realize that being on the “wrong” side of an election does not make anyone deserving of the suffering that follows.
Yes, push for political literacy. Fight disinformation. Demand better political choices. But let us not confuse the citizen’s responsibility at the ballot box with the government’s responsibility to protect its people.
More importantly,
Do not let a system that benefits from political division convince you that the Filipino standing beside you is the culprit.
They do not need to be shamed for choices shaped by conditions they did not create. They need the political and economic conditions that make genuine democratic choices possible.
And so, point your finger where power lives: at a ruling class that siphons public funds, lets corporations plunder our land and resources, and bends national policy to imperialist interests. All while sacrificing Filipinos at the altar of profit.
Let us not turn calamities into another battlefield between Filipinos living under the same oppressive structures. Instead, look up — to the offices, corporations, and interests with the power to change the conditions we are forced to live in.
The flood should not teach us to point fingers at one another. It should teach us who continues to profit from our misery.
Juliana Denise Gamboa is the Associate Editor – External of The Angelite for the Publication Year 2026-2027, and writes opinions under the column “To The Bone”
The views and opinions of the editor does not necessarily reflect those of the publication.
