In many homes, there’s an old belief: don’t call a rat a rat. Call it mabait—kind. Not because it deserves kindness, but because everyone already knows what it really is. A pest. A quiet destroyer. Something that slips into your home uninvited, feeds on what is not its own, and leaves behind damage it never intends to fix.
Sounds familiar, right?
Because we are crawling with the same kind of “kind.” Politicians who master the art of appearance: crisp barongs, rehearsed smiles, speeches engineered to sound like salvation. They flood the public with promises—progress, reform, service… unity—until the noise is loud enough to drown out what actually matters.
Because while they speak, they take.
They take from budgets meant for the public. They take from systems built to protect people. They take from a future that is constantly being postponed, diluted, and repackaged as another campaign promise.
Not loudly. Not all at once. But consistently, efficiently, and shamelessly.
That is not leadership—that is infestation.
Like rats, they don’t need chaos to do damage. They work in slow, deliberate erosion. They gnaw at the foundations—institutions, accountability, public trust—until what once stood solid begins to weaken from within. You don’t always see them in the act, but the evidence is everywhere: ghost projects, missing funds, roads that crumble too soon, programs that exist only on paper.
And still, they stand in front of cameras and call it service.
So yes—call them “kind.” Call them “mabait.”
Call them exactly what they deserve—not as praise, but as indictment. Because what else do you call something that lives off what it did not build, consumes what it did not earn, and leaves behind rot where there should have been growth?
A rat does not become harmless because you refuse to name it. It does not stop gnawing because you dress it in softer language. And a politician does not become honorable because they wrap themselves in titles, slogans, or staged humility.
Strip away the performance, and the pattern is brutally simple: take, erode, repeat: Take from the people. Erode the system. Repeat until the damage feels ordinary, until corruption sounds like governance, until theft looks like policy, and until decay is mistaken for development.
That is how infestation wins—not through force, but through persistence.
So don’t hesitate. Don’t soften it.
Call them mabait the way you would call a rat mabait—with full awareness that it is not praise, but a label for something that feeds, festers, and destroys without shame.
Written by John Benedict N. Banday (The Open Wound), Insight PH
John Benedict N. Banday (The Open Wound), Insight PH is a dedicated campus journalist and contributor. Their insightful writing sparks meaningful conversations and keeps the community informed.
