CHICKENPIE.Marcos signs the proclamation. Diesel drops P12.94 per liter. These two things happen on the same Tuesday, and somehow both are true.
A national energy emergency, according to Malacañang, is not a thing you declare when things are actually bad. March was bad — when diesel hit P79/liter and jeepney drivers were parking their rigs because the math stopped working. The small bakeries in Pampanga were raising the price of pan de sal by P1. The cold storage operators in Batangas were choosing which batches to refrigerate. The emergency is declared now, when prices are softening. Which means it wasn't declared for us. It was declared for the record.
What's actually in crisis: 7,674 OFWs came home early. Most from the Gulf, some from Malaysia, a few from states that were themselves convulsing from oil revenue volatility. They're back in Bulacan, in Iloilo, in Zamboanga, waiting for the "emergency" to trickle into their remittance numbers. It hasn't. The emergency isn't at the pump. The pump is fine, apparently. The emergency is the 7,674 people who will never see a P12.94 drop in anything that matters to them right now.
The genius of governance-by-proclamation is the document it produces. Something to point to. "We acted." The document says we acted. It doesn't say we acted on time, or usefully, or with any sense of cause and effect. It just says we acted.
Diesel goes down. The emergency goes up. We keep our eyes on the sign at the pump like it tells us something real. It tells us the price today.
Tomorrow is someone else's problem.
