Fountainhead

Those are brave individuals who accepted the challenge to constitute what is now being called the Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI). Perhaps it has yet to dawn on them that their real assignment is to rescue a political order in danger of collapsing under the weight of unbridled greed.

The ICI is very likely a misnomer – reflecting the wishful thinking of the power holders to limit the focus of the outrage to the looting of infrastructure funds. While it is true that the flood control scandal brought to light the immensity of our country’s problem with corruption, the source of the problem is ultimately the political order itself.

Our political system is organized to loot. Whoever controls the purse, controls the kickbacks. This is why we have no real political parties and why our elections are so prohibitively expensive. This is why we have cultivated an electorate shaped by political patronage. Our electoral democracy is really about who will collect the spoils of power.

Whoever it was who described our Congress as “the biggest criminal syndicate in the country” was not too far off the mark.

After we have feasted in the social media feeds of the so-called “nepo babies,” we will have to prepare to feast at the sight of the super mansions built by those who pretend to govern us. These mansions will be the final measure of the scale of the looting that has happened.

By the official definition of its work, the ICI will probably be busy unearthing ghost projects, identifying the networks of collusion between politicians, bureaucrats and contractors. They will look at audit trails and hit hard at district engineers who certified ghost projects as completed.

This is the same track opened by the competing hearings held at the House and the Senate – except that those hearings were really attempts to exculpate the really guilty, control the spin, manage the narrative and spread the blame. There is really no interest in problem solving here.

At the House, the hearings are presided over by a protege of Zaldy Co, the former chair of the appropriations committee responsible for what has been described as the most corrupt national budget we have ever seen. He and his loyal coterie have been trying very hard to pin the blame on the previous administration. This is similar to Donald Trump blaming everything that goes wrong on Joe Biden.

At the Senate, so much time has been wasted by senators professing innocence. Whatever is left of the time is devoted to implicating congressmen or denouncing minor bureaucrats for collecting their share of the bribery going on.

The ICI must transcend the congressional hearings. After all, the commission is likely vastly more competent than either chamber of our legislature.

Since the ICI is racing against the tempo of rising public protests, it must aim directly at the fountainhead of the problem of looted infrastructure funds. That fountainhead is Congress itself: the institution that exercises power over the nation’s purse, that shapes the national budget and that allows all sorts of “insertions” to be done.

The most egregious abuse of the power of the purse happened in the last three national budgets. In the 2025 national budget, counterpart funding of foreign-assisted projects were taken away and transferred to small parceled construction projects. As a result, the national government was constrained to take “idle” funds from PhilHealth and the PDIC to keep the foreign-assisted projects going. For their part, many of the small parceled construction projects fell into the hands of corrupt syndicates.

Of course, we will appreciate recommendations to improve the bidding and audit processes covering infrastructure projects. But limiting our focus to doing these will reduce the ICI into a mere instrument of state propaganda. This is why the ICI must, from the onset, go for the fountainhead of the scandalous corruption now laid bare.

Years ago, the Supreme Court took notice of the problem and declared the pork barrel allocations unconstitutional. But that did not stop the anomaly. Our elected representatives are a smart bunch when it comes to looting the public treasury. They colluded with the syndicates embedded in such agencies as the DPWH to tailor-fit projects to match constituencies and embed these in the National Expenditure Plan. In addition, our politicians introduced their own insertions.

This collusion was perfected in 2024. As a result, 2025 budget allocations for public works ballooned beyond proportion, dwarfing education, public health and defense.

Recall last February, after over 200 congressmen signed the resolution impeaching the Vice President. One not-too-smart but completely honest congressman informed his constituents through a social media post that he signed so that his district would get public works projects. What he ultimately admitted to was that the political bosses controlled the releases of approved projects.

Ordinary citizens have always been suspicious of the involvement of politicians in public works projects. But we never fully understood how this systemic corruption has become so tightly organized it resembles a multi-level marketing scheme – with the commensurate bundles of cash for each level.

As truth bombs detonate each day, an uprising becomes a possibility. This could be the reason there appears to be a run in the dollar black market.

When a political break does happen, the our citizens will look to the ICI to show the way to a less corrupt polity.