Every SONA season, a familiar narrative resurfaces—”The President wrote his own speech.”

It makes for good optics. It projects the image of a hardworking leader burning the midnight oil, carefully crafting every word that will define his administration.But let’s not confuse political messaging with reality.

A State of the Nation Address is not a college term paper that one person writes over coffee. It is the government’s annual report to the Filipino people. Every figure, every accomplishment, every policy statement, and every promise is sourced from dozens of agencies, reviewed by Cabinet secretaries, vetted by legal advisers, refined by communications teams, and organized by professional speechwriters.

The President’s role is to decide the message, revise the speech, approve its contents, and ultimately take responsibility for every word delivered before Congress.That is how modern governments work.

To claim that a President single-handedly writes an entire SONA from scratch ignores the enormous machinery behind the presidency. More importantly, it diminishes the work of the researchers, policy experts, and speechwriters whose job is precisely to prepare such an important national address.

No Fortune 500 CEO writes every page of an annual report alone. No Supreme Court justice personally drafts every sentence without assistance from law clerks and researchers. Leadership is not measured by who holds the keyboard but by who takes responsibility for the final product.

Wag mo lang kaming gawing mangmang, Ante Kler.

If the President reviews, edits, and approves his SONA, then say exactly that. There is no shame in acknowledging the collaborative process behind one of the most important speeches of the year.But asking the public to believe that, amid the demands of running an entire country, the President personally sat down and wrote a lengthy SONA from beginning to end stretches credulity.

The Filipino people deserve honesty, not mythology. Because in the end, history will not ask who typed the speech.It will ask whether the words spoken from the podium reflected the truth experienced by the people listening below.