Long-Form Writing

This is an excerpt from the MEGA March 2025 Women in Focus features story

Your voice is your lifeline, ,and if you don’t use it, you might die, literally,” political literacy advocate Nikka C. Gaddi answers through a video-call window without batting an eye when asked about the importance of speaking up against oppression. Her viewers on TikTok might be used to seeing her content about Philippine politics and the economy, buttressed by verified sources; however, her aforementioned statement in this exclusive interview with MEGA rings unequivocally true, even without citations.

Gaddi adjusts her black headphones ever-so slightly as she divulges another fact—that she is taking the call in between afternoon classes. A Fashion Design and Marketing graduate at the SoFA Design Institute in 2018, she has now found herself back in school, taking up Master of Arts in Economics at the Ateneo De Manila University. That said, if you had asked her the same question some time before, there’s a strong chance she might have answered differently. “I did not think about corruption at least more than a year ago or before I went back to school. But I realized it’s a big part of why the country is like this and there’s no literature online about it,” she explains.

Gaddi is not wrong. An academic essay by Holden Kenneth G. Alcazaren (University of the Philippines Diliman), titled “Classrooms as socio-politically conscious learning spaces: Developing political literacy, affect, and discourse,” published on the Philippine E-Journals website, in the aftermath of the Philippine presidential elections in 2022, had already proposed the need to make classrooms healthier spaces for political discussion amid the rise of fake news and misinformation, as well as the lack of venues for young people to form their own views on relevant social and political issues. “The news is reporting the corruption, but there’s no teaching about why it happens, and that’s what’s lacking,” she adds.

To the untrained eye, the link between learning about fashion and the Philippine economy and political landscape may not be obvious. From Gaddi’s perspective, though, a fabric or any piece of clothing’s textures and layers have a lot in common with a nation’s character, which in turn allows one to understand its fiscal condition better. “Ever since I started studying economics, it’s been like—you know how in a garment everything’s so nice, it’s all done? But when you unwrap it or when you fold it, you see the threads, you see it’s all jumbled, and you see how it’s made. That’s how I see the country right now,” she shares.

Her creativity might have prepared her well in her content creation passage, but it’s Gaddi’s keen observations of reality that have given her a clearer direction and purpose: to shed light on Philippine development that’s based on studies and research, not mere speculations. “My turning point was when I was actually at a carinderia. I was in a poor area in Makati City and I was buying food and there was this little kid, who was probably like 3 or 4 years old, and he was holding a phone. You know what he was doing? He was watching TikTok.” she narrates. “I can imagine that by the time that this kid is like 10, most of these kids’ opinions will come from short videos.”