At first it was just a shirt.
A simple gesture of personal branding, they said.
Leaders wore a particular shade of blue, yellow, red, green, violet, pink, or orange, and it became their signature look — like Steve Jobs with his black turtleneck, but less Silicon Valley and more barangay fiesta.
Then came the pens.
You’d spot them signing documents with ink that matched their shirts.
Cute, right? A bit of flair.
Who doesn’t want to approve a budget with a pen that proudly declares, “I am my Pantone”?
But oh, how quickly the paint spread.
What began as harmless branding evolved into political interior decorating with a public budget.
Campaign colors escaped the shirts, pens, posters, and tarpaulin and invaded public property.
Before long, politicians weren’t just promoting themselves.
They were repainting the entire town.
Bridges.
Streetlamps.
Municipal Halls.
Public markets.
Waiting sheds.
Plazas.
Health centers.
Even daycare roofs — painted in hues so loud they could guide aircraft.
You’d think you were entering a theme park instead of a municipality.
The color coding has become so intense that Google Maps may soon identify towns by political palette instead of street name.
Then the schools joined the exhibition.
Chairs and tables once content to be brown or gray suddenly graduated into campaign colors. Classrooms began looking less like places of learning and more like satellite headquarters of the local political machine.
Nothing says public education quite like teaching children that every chair, wall, table, and blackboard must salute whoever currently holds the paintbrush.
Students can identify the town head not by policy or performance, but by the shade surrounding the classroom door.
Civics, apparently, now begins with color recognition.
You no longer need to ask who governs the town.
Just look at the nearest bridge.
If it’s Barney purple, you already know.
If the lampposts, sidewalks, waiting sheds, and health center window grills all wear matching shades, congratulations — you have entered a municipality governed by Pantone.
Some lampposts don’t even look like lampposts anymore.
They look like giant sticks of Doble Cara planted proudly along the highway.
Apparently, public service now comes with a mandatory color palette.
Now, I understand branding.
Voters remember faces, slogans, jingles, hand gestures, and yes, colors.
During campaign season, everyone suddenly becomes your cousin four times removed, your childhood friend, or the forgotten godparent of your youngest child.
That’s politics.
But when taxpayer money finances an endless repainting project so every public structure quietly whispers one person’s name, it stops looking like campaign identity. It starts looking like cult membership.
Because this was never really about color.
It is about control.
Public property supposedly belongs to everyone.
Political paint has a way of making it look leased to one clan.
Like a dog with a spray can.
What’s next?
Hospital scrubs in campaign colors?
Public school diplomas printed in the town head’s preferred shade?
“Sorry, Ma’am. Your blood type is B+. This is the Yellow Zone. Please proceed to the next municipality.”
The joke, unfortunately, isn’t entirely fictional.
And then there’s the cost.
The paint budget could probably finance feeding programs, classroom repairs, library books, or additional medicines for the rural health unit.
Instead, another coat goes onto a perfectly functional bridge because apparently, infrastructure expires whenever election results do.
A bridge in the wrong color, it seems, is a greater emergency than a classroom without books.
A waiting shed that does not match the town head’s shirt must be corrected immediately. A leaking school roof can wait.
Priorities, after all, must be visible from the highway.
Somewhere along the way, government stopped asking, “What do people need?”
It started asking, “Does this match the campaign poster?”
It is no longer “Build, Build, Build.”
It is “Paint, Paint, Paint.”
Then election day comes.
A new administration wins.
Out comes another batch of paint.
The same bridge.
The same public market.
The same waiting shed.
Only the color changes.
Development stays exactly where it was.
So the next time someone tells me color doesn’t matter in politics, I’ll invite them to sit on a municipal bench that has been repainted three times in nine years.
Not because it needed repainting.
But because every administration wanted the town to remember one thing:
This isn’t your bridge.
This is my color.
You merely paid for the paint.
