A News5 post went viral this week for all the wrong reasons. VP Sara Duterte, defending herself against criticism of the government's slow repatriation response for Filipinos stranded in the Middle East, compared the situation to what she did during COVID-19 as Davao City mayor — when she contracted a commercial airline to bring stranded Davaoenos home from Metro Manila.
"Napakadaling magpadala ng eroplano sa totoo lang," she said. "It's very easy to send a plane."
The comments section did not let that stand. Thousands pointed out the obvious: COVID-19 grounded planes due to health protocols, not missile attacks and closed airspace. The Middle East is currently under active conflict, with airports in affected areas hit by airstrikes. No commercial airline will fly into a war zone. No country will grant overflight rights for a conflict area without extraordinary diplomatic negotiation. The Davao-to-Manila charter and a repatriation flight through active Middle East airspace are not comparable operations by any reasonable measure.
The viral mockery was, on this point, fair.
When a Comparison Undermines the Argument
The charitable reading of Sara's statement is that she was trying to signal urgency — to argue that the government should be moving faster and more decisively than it is. That is a legitimate position to take. The less charitable reading is that she made a technically flawed analogy in an attempt to score political points on a crisis affecting over 2,000 Filipinos who are genuinely scared and stranded.
The problem with the COVID comparison is not just rhetorical. It reveals a gap in understanding of what repatriation from a conflict zone actually requires. During COVID, Philippine airspace was open, foreign airspace was negotiable, and airports were functioning — just restricted. Right now, airports in parts of the Middle East have been hit by airstrikes. Airspace over conflict zones requires overflight clearances from multiple countries. Commercial airlines operating on thin margins will not risk aircraft and crew in an active war zone. Military aircraft like the AFP's C-130 are options, but they have range and capacity limits, and they still require safe landing zones.
None of this means the government's response has been adequate. It means that Sara's specific argument — essentially, "I chartered a plane during COVID so why can't Marcos do it now?" — is not a serious analysis of the problem.
But the Government's Response Has Its Own Problems
The viral mockery of Sara's comment should not be allowed to do the work of exonerating the Marcos administration's handling of this crisis. Because the administration's response has its own questions to answer.
As of March 7, over 2,000 Filipinos had formally requested repatriation. Approximately 60 had been successfully repatriated — via two Emirates commercial flights, not government-chartered planes. The Department of Migrant Workers was publicly criticized for slow response, and its defense was to point to airspace closures as the reason. The government's own communications office, meanwhile, was issuing press releases about "exit points and repatriation plans" being "ready" — while barely 60 people had actually made it home.
President Marcos told OFWs to "shelter in place" and "stay safe" — advice that, while perhaps operationally sound given the airspace constraints, lands poorly when delivered to workers who are frightened, in some cases without income, and watching the conflict escalate around them. The government has over 2 million Filipinos in the Middle East. The infrastructure of care for those workers — the response protocols, the shelter systems, the diplomatic channels for emergency repatriation — has been tested by this crisis and found wanting in speed if not in intent.
The DMW's blame of airspace closures is partially valid. It is also a convenient deflection from questions about why the systems for rapid response were not more robustly pre-positioned given that Middle East tensions had been escalating for months before the current crisis.
The OFW Question Nobody Is Really Asking
Behind both Sara's gaffe and the government's defensive crouch is a larger question neither side is seriously engaging: why does the Philippines remain so dependent on labor export that over 2 million of its citizens are concentrated in a region that has been in recurring crisis for years?
The OFW remittance economy is a pillar of Philippine GDP. It is also a structural acknowledgment that the domestic economy cannot absorb the labor of its own people. Every time a Middle East crisis erupts — and they erupt with some regularity — the Philippines faces the same anxious calculation: how many of our people are over there, how do we get them out, and what do we do with them when they come back?
Neither Sara Duterte's viral airplane comment nor the Marcos administration's shelter-in-place advisories addresses that question. Both are managing the surface of a crisis whose roots run far deeper than any single administration's response capacity.
The Bottom Line
Sara's COVID-to-Middle East airplane comparison was uninformed and it deserved the criticism it received. But the rush to mock her should not obscure the legitimate concern underneath it: the government has been slow, the numbers of successful repatriations are low relative to the requests, and Filipinos in a war zone deserve better than "stay safe" from their President. Both things are true. Philippine political coverage, as usual, picked a side and amplified it, rather than holding both the gaffe and the underlying failure in the same frame.
Sources: Rappler – Marcos shelter in place · Philstar – Marcos on repatriation difficulties · Manila Times – 1,416 repatriation requests · Daily Tribune – DMW criticism · Philstar – What we know: Filipinos stranded
