Dr. Jose Rizal Excution | Screengrab from YouTube
Jose Rizal died for a dream — that Filipinos would rise as a nation governed by reason, justice, and dignity. His execution was meant to silence a man who exposed a rotten system; instead, it exposed a people too often willing to endure it. Today, under leaders who boast of reform while recycling the old abuses of power, the question is brutal: was his martyrdom wasted on a country that refuses to revolt against its own oppressors?
In the 2022 elections, international observers documented rampant vote‑buying, intimidation, red‑tagging, and politically motivated violence under the campaign that swept candidates into power, calling it the most repressive atmosphere. We have not ended tyranny; we have normalized it through ballots bought with cash, food packs, and fake nostalgia. When democracy is auctioned off in barangay halls and town plazas, every peso pressed into a voter’s hand spits on the freedom Rizal envisioned.
This same logic of managed poverty runs through our flagship social programs. The Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) and other conditional cash transfers are marketed as tools of empowerment. Yet government and academic reports themselves admit unresolved issues—unaccounted disbursements totaling billions of pesos and weak documentation—raising questions about leakages and capture by local political brokers. Instead of building robust rural economies, quality public services, and dignified jobs, we feed people experiencing poverty just enough to keep them alive—and voting. Jose Rizal demanded that the rights lift the people; we give them alms wrapped in campaign colors.
Look at how this government “values” education. For 2024, the administration trumpeted a P924.7‑billion education budget, with P31 billion for CHED and P105.6 billion for state universities and colleges (SUCs), and P51.1 billion for the Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education program. Yet SUCs still report multibillion‑peso shortfalls between 2022 and 2025, undermining their ability to expand access, hire enough instructors, and maintain facilities for a growing student population. Behind the glossy figures are students denied full scholarships, forced to juggle part‑time work and mounting costs, while the children of political dynasties glide through elite private schools here and abroad. Rizal’s “youth as hope of the fatherland” now compete for crumbs in a system designed to keep quality education scarce.
“Rizal’s blood is a debt, not a decoration. We either pay it with courage now, or, to history, admit that we chose comfort in chains over the hard, dangerous work of becoming truly free.”
Meanwhile, justice remains a luxury item. Election monitors in 2022 recorded a pattern of political killings, harassment, and weaponized red‑tagging against opposition voices, all under the shadow of a family whose name is synonymous with plunder. Complaints about the misuse of social protection funds and other public money crawl through institutions that move swiftly only when persecuting critics. We adorn our courtrooms and plazas with Rizal’s monuments, while protecting politicians and cronies whose actions mock everything he wrote.
We have learned to give polite names to ugly realities. We call vote‑buying “tradition,” elite impunity “rule of law,” and the endless recycling of discredited clans “will of the people.” We tolerate budgets that look impressive on paper but leave public universities underfunded and millions still trapped in precarious, low‑wage work. Rizal did not die so that we would become experts at rationalizing cowardice.
The revolution he began remains unfinished, not because Spain still rules us, but because too many Filipinos accept local tyrants in its place. A regime that sustains itself on disinformation, transactional welfare, and the bought silence of the poor is not the republic he imagined. If we continue to trade our future for short‑term relief and myth‑laden strongmen, then yes—his martyrdom is in vain.
But it does not have to stay that way. Making his sacrifice matter in the 2020s means refusing vote‑buyers even when hungry, demanding transparent and fully funded education budgets, insisting that cash transfers be paired with real rural development and job creation, and confronting—on the streets, online, and at the polls—the dynasties that have hijacked our democracy. Rizal’s blood is a debt, not a decoration. We either pay it with courage now, or, to history, admit that we chose comfort in chains over the hard, dangerous work of becoming truly free.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Crispin Fernandez advocates for overseas Filipinos, public health, transformative political change, and patriotic economics. He is also a community organizer, leader, and freelance writer.
