Money and corruption are ruining the land, crooked politicians betray the working man, pocketing the profits and treating us like sheep, and we're tired of hearing promises that we know they'll never keep.
— English musician Sir Raymond Douglas Davies CBE

MAYPAJO, Caloocan City — Our column today was sourced from a social media post by our dear friend Presidential Climate Change Task Force chief retired Colonel Paul Garcia Tucay . . .
According to Col. Tucay, the real story behind NBI Director Jaime Santiago's abrupt resignation concerns politics, corruption and more importantly the cost of reform in our corrupt system of governance.
The truth, our friend said, is that Jaime Santiago didn’t just “step down.”
Accordingly, the former judge and police officer's sudden resignation last August 15, 2025, wasn’t some routine changing of the guard at the NBI—it was the collapse of a reform mission colliding with politics, corruption and the weight of a government shaken by midterm defeat.
But before going into this, let us first see what kind of person the resigned NBI chief is, after all we have know him as a straightforward man of character who believed in 'no-nonsense' response and action against crime and corruption.
When our dear President Ferdinand 'Bongbong' Marcos Jr. (PBBM) picked Santiago in June 2024 as the NBI's top man, he should have realized Santiago wasn’t just another paper-pusher appointee.
Santiago's track record shows his character. He had been a sharpshooter in the Manila Police District (MPD) whose presence once forced hostage-takers to surrender or else end up incapacitated. We actually witnessed one incident where he shot dead a deranged suspect who took hostage a young elementary pupil inside a public school in Tondo.
Then from being a respected member of the MPD's Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) unit, he joined the Judiciary as a prosecutor and eventually a judge and finally as NBI director, from which he just lamentably resigned and was confirmed out of the country’s premier investigative agency by Malacañan. I all these jobs he took, Santiago carried both street experience and courtroom authority.
And on entering the August halls of the NBI, his vision was very simple: clean the Bureau of scalawags. He was doing this actually as he took this mission to heart.
But the demolition propaganda hitting him for doing what was right got to him, so his line became also very simple: “Leave the government the way I entered it—untainted.”
Across his performance as public servant, our friend didn’t play politics. His last post saw him disbanding the entire Special Task Force (STF) of the NBI—all 13 members reassigned—and at the same time ordered the Bureau's Internal Affairs to investigate.
The STF had been created for high-stakes cases like the criminally-inclined Philippine Offshore Gaming Operations (POGOs) and scam networks. Killing it off gutted one of the NBI’s top Units. But Santiago made his call: better to lose capability than let rot spread.
But matters resulted the way he thought it would. Critics hit him hard so he suspected that the fiasco was deliberate, set up for someone else’s interests.
Interestingly, Santiago’s troubles came while president Marcos Jr. was reeling from a major political beating. In the May 2025 midterm polls, the administration’s ticket collapsed with only six of its candidates squeezing into half of the 12 Senate seats out for grabs.
It was during this time that PBBM’s ratings plummeted down to the low 30s while vice president 'Inday' Sara Duterte-Carpio's score soared higher. So to recover from the debacle, the chief executive ordered his entire cabinet to resign—and Santiago complied.
His resignation is a sad day for those who want positive change and reform. Imagine, in just 14 months, Santiago had already shaken the foundations of the NBI with four employees arrested for fixer rackets, corrupt officers dismissed across divisions and the disbanding of the STF. These showed he was willing to cut deep to keep the Bureau clean.
Santiago leaves behind unfinished work an we're afraid that corruption inside the NBI is still there. The next director will have to either carry the fight forward or fold under pressure.
So this isn’t just Santiago’s story. It’s a reminder of how reformers in this system often end up cornered. The corrupt wait, the reformer falls and the institution goes back to business as usual.

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