A generational shift is what Senator Alan Peter Cayetano says the country needs to break its long entanglement with corruption, telling younger Filipinos that the responsibility for cleaning up government increasingly falls to them.
Speaking during a Facebook Live broadcast, the senator framed the campaign against graft as a task best carried by the youngest voting-age Filipinos. “Laban ito ng ating mga Gen Z,” he said. He argued that recycled approaches were no match for the problems confronting the nation now: “We cannot solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solution.”
Cayetano described corruption as something that has worked its way into the structures of government rather than remaining confined to a few bad actors. He pointed to the period after 1986 to make the case, contending that the toppling of the Marcos dictatorship did not eliminate graft so much as scatter it. “Hindi nawala yung corruption, na-decentralize lang,” he said, adding that what once concentrated in the executive had since seeped into Congress, local government units, and even the barangay level.
The human cost, in his telling, is measured in lost livelihoods and diminished public services. He said stolen public money translates into fewer jobs, weaker health care, poorer nutrition, less education, and narrower prospects, pushing Filipinos to look for work overseas. “Millions of Filipinos who will have to go abroad because walang trabaho dito,” he said.
The senator also pressed a warning about silence and complicity, asking what burden would fall on those who come after if wrongdoing is concealed. “Ano yung cost sa next generation kapag kinover up natin ito?” he said.
Cayetano’s appeal to younger Filipinos lands at a moment when students and youth groups have already taken to the streets over the alleged plunder of flood control funds. Tens of thousands joined anti-corruption demonstrations in September 2025 tied to the controversy, with rallies at the EDSA Shrine and the People Power Monument, while separate campus walkouts and a National Youth Day of Action Against Corruption drew thousands more in the months that followed.
He also turned to the country’s posture abroad, rejecting the idea that asserting national interest requires aligning against any major power. The Philippines, he said, should chart its own course. “We don’t need to be anti-China or anti-US to be pro-Philippines,” Cayetano said.
