Plundered

The nation has been plundered.

With every rainfall, the calamity becomes more profound. Our people are tormented by the floods in so many ways.

We are the people Noah left behind. Had the trillions of pesos allocated for flood control been used properly, our feet might be dry. But now we have to wade through dirty waters to get to work. If we are to be rescued from this fate, it will have to be by our own means.

In Indonesia, the past few days, riots broke out, homes of elected officials were invaded by mobs and items of luxury thrown into bonfires. Among the reasons for the rage was the discovery that legislators gave themselves $3,000 per month in allowances. That is such a pitiful sum compared to what our legislators get – legally or otherwise.

The more we know about what happened leading to the looting of hundreds of billions related to the flood control projects, the more we understand the scale of the failure of governance that we suffer from. There were so many red flags all around. It required such an assiduous effort to ignore them.

Perhaps the biggest red flag in this case is the fact that it is our legislators that identify public works projects, insert funding for them in the national budget and, consequently, receive a cut from the corruption chain where they are recognized as “funders.” It is shocking that these public works projects were undertaken without coordination with the local government units.

In this system, no master planning could happen. The bidding process is reduced to pure chaos. Engineering standards vary widely. The construction of public works is governed simply by the need to spend taxpayer money regardless of their effects on public welfare.

Our legislators were elected to legislate. Yet they have usurped the functions of the Executive branch. This is probably the only country where this happens. We now see the results of this anomaly.

This system has been in place for years. But it was never corrected. Not even after the Supreme Court declared the pork barrel system unconstitutional.

The fact that legislators effectively undertake public works indicates a failure in governance – and a political failure in government.

We actually have a government agency – the DPWH – that is supposed to police our public works, enforce standards, ensure proper accreditation of contracting companies and confirm the outcomes of public investments in infrastructure. This agency has been failing for years. This red flag has been ignored as well.

Over 70 percent of the officials at the DPWH do not have career executive certifications. Most of the district engineers have been recommended by politicians. They very likely do not have the skills required to do what they are supposed to be doing.

Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano questions why obviously negligent DPWH officials remain in their posts despite the magnitude of the controversy over the flood control projects. At every stage in the execution of government projects, the DPWH requires full documentation. There should be photographs before certification. Yet, despite the rules, “ghost” projects still slip through – many of them certified as fully completed.

Cayetano warns that keeping the implicated officials in place allows the criminal syndicates to cover their tracks. Paper trails are easy to erase.

In some cases, the failure of the accreditation process is glaring. One firm, QM Builders, won contracts amounting to P7.3 billion despite having a paid-up capital of only P1.25 million. The agency ignored the red flag.

The ostentatious lifestyles of DPWH executives is another red flag ignored for too long. Supporting such lifestyles probably required ignoring the proper procedures the agency set on paper but not in deed.

Resigned DPWH secretary Manuel Bonoan admitted candidly, during the first hearing of the Senate Blue Ribbon committee, that “ghost” flood control projects do exist. Many of these invisible projects were certified as completed. It has been clear for a long time this agency is failing.

To date, there has been no systematic inquiry into the manner the 2024 and 2025 national budgets were mangled by the legislators. We should not expect that the suspects investigate themselves for this gross betrayal of public office.

I took the time, yesterday, to observe the second hearing of the Senate Blue Ribbon committee. The chair of the committee should be credited for taking the steps no other government entity thought of doing: alerting the Anti-Money Laundering Council to look into the accounts of those implicated in the flood control scams; directing the BIR to investigate the tax payments of the same suspects; directing the immigration authorities to put the main personalities on a watchlist.

But the rest of the hearing was rather chaotic. Senators quarreled over their speaking time. Questions were thrown at random without the means for a more systematic follow-through. Then the usual grandstanding our politicians are heir to.

In other countries, hearings such as this one are conducted by a trained prosecutor. All the elected members of the chamber have to course their questions through the prosecutor. The result is a logical progress in the inquiry with minimal digressions and useless chatter. Resource persons are scheduled to be interrogated instead of a whole army of officials made to sit through long hours wondering when they may be asked.

It is a more efficient and rational way to conduct public hearings.