From SONA to Sana: The Perennial Excess of Promise over Performance in the Ritual of the State of the Nation
From SONA to Sana: The Perennial Excess of Promise over Performance in the Ritual of the State of the Nation
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
July 28, 2026
In the annual theater of the Philippine State of the Nation Address, the constitutional mandate of accountability is transmuted into a liturgy of aspiration. On 27 July 2026, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. delivered his fifth such address—the penultimate report of a six-year term—before a joint session of Congress. He opened with the accounting of the flood-control scandal first dramatized the previous year: charges filed, assets frozen approaching ₱25 billion, more than ₱800 million returned to the Treasury, and the imminent filing of cases against even his own cousin, former House Speaker Martin Romualdez. He catalogued investments facilitated through Green Lanes exceeding ₱6 trillion, housing units under the 4PH program surpassing 500,000, land titles distributed, rice subsidies distributed, energy emergency measures against Middle East shocks, and the rhetorical demand that systems-loss charges and certain VAT burdens be lifted from electricity bills. Yet the address moved, almost without pause, into a catalogue of what remains to be done: the Sariling Kuryente Act, expanded income-tax exemptions to ₱350,000, nuclear energy revisited, electric vehicles comprising half the fleet by 2040, railway lines operational by 2027, a spaceport sounding-rocket test, the completion of agrarian-debt condonation, and the solemn pledge that “in the remaining two years of this administration, we will finish what we have started and fulfill our promise to the Filipino people.”
The gap between the ledger of completed acts and the horizon of announced intentions is not accidental; it is structural. Critics immediately renamed the ritual “Sona full of ‘sana’”—the Filipino particle of hope, wish, and unrealized conditional. The phonetic slide from SONA to sana is more than wordplay; it names the ontological condition of Philippine presidential rhetoric. The address ceases to be primarily a report and becomes a promissory note whose maturity date is forever deferred to the next fiscal year, the next Congress, the next administration.
Why is this the norm? The answer lies less in individual character than in the deep grammar of democratic representation under conditions of delayed institutional capacity, temporal asymmetry, and the political economy of hope.
First, the temporal mismatch between the electoral cycle and the infrastructural cycle is absolute. A president’s political capital is measured in six-year increments; a railway, a power-plant reform, a systemic purge of procurement cartels, or the reconfiguration of an agricultural value chain requires decades. The SONA therefore functions as a device for compressing historical time into electoral time. What cannot be delivered within the remaining mandate is projected forward as inevitability—“by 2027,” “by 2040,” “within the year.” The promise becomes a temporal prosthetic: it allows the speaker to inhabit a future in which the structural constraints of the present have already been overcome. In phenomenological terms, the SONA performs what Husserl called the “protention” of the living present—the anticipatory halo that makes the incomplete appear already whole.
Second, the political marketplace rewards the surplus of intention over the scarcity of execution. In a polity still marked by weak programmatic parties and strong personalistic networks, the currency of legitimacy is not audited performance but the credible performance of sincerity. The public, conditioned by successive cycles of deferred fulfillment, has learned to treat the SONA less as a contract than as a morality play. The president who enumerates concrete failures risks appearing defeated; the president who enumerates concrete intentions appears still in motion. The applause that greets the demand for the removal of systems-loss charges is not applause for a statute already enacted, but for the shared fiction that the demand itself constitutes progress. The speech thus participates in what Claude Lefort called the “empty place of power”: the seat of sovereignty remains vacant precisely because it is filled with representations of what power will one day do.
Third, the institutional architecture itself generates promissory inflation. Legislative bottlenecks, bureaucratic inertia, judicial delays, and the enduring power of local dynasties and contractor networks convert every presidential initiative into a multi-stage negotiation. The announcement of a policy in the SONA is often the first, and sometimes the only, moment at which the policy exists in pure form—uncontaminated by committee revisions, budget cuts, or implementing rules that dilute its original force. The more ambitious the promise, the greater the political credit extracted at the moment of announcement; the subsequent dilution is attributed to “Congress,” “the bureaucracy,” or “external shocks.” Responsibility is thereby externalized while credit remains centralized. This is not merely cynicism; it is a rational adaptation to a system in which the capacity to deliver is systematically fragmented while the capacity to claim authorship remains unitary.
Philosophically, the phenomenon recalls the distinction between the constative and the performative. The SONA pretends to be constative—an inventory of what is the case—yet operates primarily as performative: it brings into being a temporary community of hope. The repeated formula “we will finish what we have started” does not describe an existing trajectory so much as it constitutes the speaker and the audience as co-authors of a shared future. In Austinian terms, the utterance is felicitous not when the railways open or the tax thresholds change, but when the chamber rises in applause. The measure of success is theatrical, not empirical.
Yet the cumulative effect of successive promissory cycles is a gradual erosion of the very hope that the ritual seeks to replenish. When every SONA is predominantly sana, the public’s capacity for genuine expectation atrophies. The citizen learns to inhabit a permanent conditional tense: the nation is always about to become what it is not yet. This is the deeper pathology. The perpetual surplus of promise over accomplishment does not merely fail to deliver goods; it reconstitutes the political subject as one whose primary relation to the state is the relation of the petitioner to the not-yet-given. Sovereignty is experienced less as the capacity of a people to govern itself than as the intermittent bestowal of favors whose full realization is forever postponed.
The 2026 address is therefore exemplary rather than exceptional. It continues a pattern visible across administrations: the dramatization of selected accomplishments (especially those that can be quantified in the short term or that punish visible villains), followed by an expansive architecture of intentions whose fulfillment is left to the residual time of the mandate or to successors. The norm is not broken by greater personal will or better rhetoric; it is sustained by the structural conditions that make the promise more politically legible—and more immediately rewarding—than the long, unglamorous work of institutional delivery.
From SONA to sana is thus not a failure of a particular presidency but the disclosure of the form itself. Until the temporal horizons of political accountability are brought into closer alignment with the temporal horizons of public goods, the annual address will remain what it has become: a carefully staged exercise in the production of deferred presence—the nation that is always almost, and therefore never quite, itself.
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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™' s connection to the Asian Cultural Council (ACC) serves as a defining pillar of his professional journey, most recently celebrated through the launch of the ACC Global Alumni Network.As a 2003 Starr Foundation Grantee, Roldan participated in a transformative ten-month fellowship in the United States. This opportunity allowed him to observe contemporary art movements, engage with an international community of artists and curators, and develop a new body of work that bridges local and global perspectives.Featured Work: Bridges Beyond Borders His featured work, Bridges Beyond Borders: ACC's Global Cultural Collaboration, has been chosen as the visual identity for the newly launched ACC Global Alumni Network.Symbol of Connection: The piece represents a private collaborative space designed to unite over 6,000 ACC alumni across various disciplines and regions.Artistic Vision: The work embodies the ACC's core mission of advancing international dialogue and cultural exchange to foster a more harmonious world.Legacy of Excellence: By serving as the face of this initiative, Roldan's art highlights the enduring impact of the ACC fellowship on his career and his role in the global artistic community.Just featured at https://www.pressenza.com/2026/01/the-asian-cultural-council-global-alumni-network-amiel-gerald-a-roldan/
He is a Filipino multidisciplinary visual artist, printmaker, painter, independent curator, researcher, writer, and cultural worker whose practice spans contemporary art, curatorial work, and cultural advocacy. He has been active in the Philippine art scene since the late 1990s and has worked with galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, and international cultural organizations.
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A multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.
He has been active in the Philippine art scene since the late 1990s and has worked with galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, and international cultural organizations.His practice appears to represent several interconnected concerns:
Cultural work as artistic practice. Roldan has argued that the labor of curating, organizing exhibitions, teaching, documentation, and cultural administration should be understood as creative work rather than merely support work. This perspective has been reflected in his writings and exhibitions.
Social and political engagement. His artworks frequently address politics, religion, faith, denial, courage, social inequality, and the everyday experiences of Filipinos. He has stated that he draws inspiration from Filipino cultural practices while approaching painting, printmaking, and installation from a conceptual perspective.Printmaking and conceptual art. Roldan is particularly recognized for his printmaking, with works shown internationally, including exhibitions in Japan and France. His practice also encompasses painting, photography, installation, and curatorial research.International cultural exchange. A significant milestone in his career was receiving an Asian Cultural Council fellowship in 2003, which enabled him to undertake research and create work in the United States while engaging with artists and curators internationally.
More broadly, Roldan's work represents an attempt to bridge artistic production, curatorial practice, scholarship, and cultural activism . His writings often emphasize postcolonial discourse, cultural memory, and the ethics of artistic collaboration, positioning the artist not only as a maker of objects but also as a builder of cultural infrastructure.
In the Philippine contemporary art context, he can be understood as representing the figure of the artist-curator-cultural worker —someone who contributes both through making artworks and through developing exhibitions, mentoring artists, and fostering institutional and independent cultural initiatives.
Recent show at ILOMOCA
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