By: Raymond Dimayuga
There was a time when the Department of the Interior and Local Government felt invisible for the right reasons. When it worked, it did not trend. It coordinated. It enforced. It aligned local governments across an archipelago of storms, politics, and uneven capacity. The DILG has never been designed to be theatrical. It is a structural agency, a backbone institution. It connects barangays to provinces, mayors to national standards, and disasters to response systems. That is its mandate.
The scale alone should humble any attempt to reduce it to messaging. The DILG supervises local governments nationwide, alongside thousands of barangays and attached public safety agencies including the police, fire protection, and jail management bureaus. Its work touches disaster preparedness, peace and order, regulatory compliance, and local governance reform. This is not a storytelling department. It is a systems department.
Performance indicators over the years have consistently shown that many local governments still struggle to meet the highest standards of governance and service delivery. That gap is where the real work of the DILG lives. Its battlefield is not perception. It is capacity.
During disasters, the agency becomes the country’s coordination spine. It issues directives to activate emergency clusters, identify high-risk areas, preposition resources, and synchronize local response with national guidance. When storms strike and communities brace for impact, these systems determine whether evacuation is timely and response is coordinated. None of this generates applause, but it determines outcomes that matter.
The rollout of a unified emergency hotline integrating police, fire, and medical response nationwide reflects the kind of reform that rarely trends but quietly strengthens public safety. Structural improvements like these do not produce viral moments, yet they save lives.
This is why the deeper question facing the DILG today is not about visibility, but about balance. Governance in the digital age requires communication. Citizens deserve transparency and updates. But communication cannot replace coordination. Press releases can announce intentions. Systems reveal outcomes.
When the weight shifts too heavily toward public narrative, governance risks becoming performative. The department’s strength has always been operational immersion: monitoring compliance, guiding local governments, correcting deficiencies, and strengthening resilience from the ground up. These are slow, patient, administrative labors. They do not sparkle on social media. Yet they are the difference between a prepared municipality and a panicked one.
The public ultimately does not measure the DILG by how frequently it appears in the news cycle. It measures it by quieter indicators: whether local governments improve, whether disasters are managed efficiently, whether public safety systems function when needed. An effective DILG produces fewer crises, not louder announcements.
The Philippines does not need its interior governance arm to be louder. It needs to be stronger. When the next storm gathers strength in the Pacific, when evacuation orders must be issued across provinces, when response teams must coordinate across jurisdictions, no one will be reviewing press clippings. They will be looking at whether the systems hold.
And that has always been the real work of the DILG.
—
Eat the Worm is a weekly column that dives headfirst into unconventional ideas, uncomfortable truths, and the gritty realities we often shy away from. Much like the brave tradition of “eating the worm” in a tequila bottle, this column challenges readers to confront the hard stuff with courage and curiosity. This is a fearless exploration of life’s rawest and most compelling topics.