Vital

The weather cooperated. The people responded.

Last Sunday, tens of thousands of Filipinos poured out to the streets in rally sites nationwide to speak the nation’s soul. In the same way that Sept. 21, 1972 was a watershed moment for our shared imagination of nationhood, last Sunday was yet another turning point.

Nationalism is never enough to pull a country from the quagmire. We need to build a civic culture of caring for one another. We need a government that crystallizes the civic culture.

Those of a certain age lived through all the tumult: the radicalization of the late ’60s, the imposition of martial rule, the years of stubborn resistance, the uprising of 1986 and the expulsion of a president in 2001. We are exhausted. The temptation to give up trying is strong. But the surge of new faces joining the street protests gives us hope.

We have our children and grandchildren to fight for, weary as we are. We have to bring our own stone to the edifice of a modern polity – although that stone gets heavier as we age.

After all the struggles of the past decades, we now face the most immense corruption scandal in our history. Our government has proven dysfunctional. It has been looted blind by criminal syndicates of bottomless greed. There is suffering everywhere as ordinary Filipinos suffer the tolls of dysfunctional rule.

The Marcos government is trying very hard to stay one step ahead of the rage rapidly building up – and position itself on the side of reform.

Alarm bells were raised early. Last year, Sara Duterte warned about the national budget falling under the control of the duo of Martin Romualdez and Zaldy Co. Economists and business groups raised the alarm over the mangling of the 2025 national budget. Petitions were filed at the Supreme Court questioning the constitutionality of the General Appropriations Act the Marcos Jr. signed into law with token veto that left the congressional insertions largely intact.

All the alarms about government misspending were affirmed by the massive flooding the country experienced with the first burst of monsoon rains.

In his 2024 SONA, Marcos boasted the completion of 5,500 flood control projects. In his last July 28 SONA, he quickly dropped that boast and denounced the shamelessness of those plundering the National Treasury through shoddy projects. Little did he realize he was opening a Pandora’s Box of organized plunder.

The Office of the President created the Isumbong sa Pangulo website to gather information about the flood control rackets. Immediately, that website was flooded with 16,000 citizen reports.

The sheer volume of citizen reporting constrained the President to visit the questioned projects himself. He inspected over a dozen flood control projects, finding all of them substandard or non-existent.

Marcos himself announced the biggest contractors involved in the flood control program. The licenses of the top 15 contractors were suspended and their companies blacklisted. The contractors accreditation board was revamped. Manuel Bonoan’s resignation accepted. Vince Dizon – by far the most credible person in the Marcos Cabinet – was appointed to to clean up the DPWH. All further flood control spending was cancelled pending the cleanup.

Marcos then ordered lifestyle checks on all government officials. The Bureau of Customs moved quickly and confiscated the fleet of luxury vehicles accumulated by the Discaya couple. After summary proceedings, DPWH engineers were fired, suspended or reassigned.

The COA has moved on its own, filing cases against the Discayas and the most notorious DPWH personnel. The AMLC froze the assets of contractors linked to the flood control scandal. Lookout orders were issued by the Immigration Bureau. The BSP imposed a P500,000 limit on cash withdrawals after those sensational photos of half a billion in cold cash collected by DPWH officials surfaced.

Finally, the President constituted the Independent Commission on Infrastructure (ICI) to spearhead investigations. The ICI immediately swung into action.

The flurry of executive actions notwithstanding, it seems the scandal just grows with every revelation. Exposition of the role played by legislators in this organized plunder adds an entirely new dimension to the scandal. Speaker Martin Romualdez was forced to step down.

The more inquiries are held, it seems that scandal grows exponentially. It will be a challenge for the President to stay a step ahead of this national disgrace.

The ICI is under pressure to produce results quickly. But remember that the Presidential Commission on Good Government took decades to do its work – with mixed results at best.

Due process, unfortunately, takes time. If we had a revolutionary government, the most notorious plunderers might have been put to the wall and summarily shot. But there are standards of due process we will have to maintain – unless we want to see all the sitting leaders brought to The Hague en masse.

Senators and congressmen may arbitrarily detain witnesses by simply declaring them in contempt. But it does not work that way if it is the legislators who need to be deprived of liberty by summary means.

Nevertheless, the process of unearthing the truth has to proceed as fast as possible. This process is vital to holding our nation together, hoping the subsisting government is still capable of healing itself.

It will take years to do all the due diligence required to bring us justice: the fraud audit, the filing of cases and the court hearings. But it is the least turbulent way.