Two months was how long it took to cause flushed-red faces at the public works department and for the bridge to become the latest poster child of corrupted public works projects.

Opened only last 27 September to great fanfare with the President inaugurating it himself, calls are now mounting for an investigation into the P8.026-billion Panguil Bay Bridge in Northern Mindanao.

All because someone thought the bridge’s asphalt overlay didn’t matter.

A fact proved by a friend of mine who, expecting a leisurely drive on the 3.17-kilometer bridge intended to boost tourism and the economies of Lanao del Norte and Misamis Occidental, complained he had to swerve several times to avoid the large potholes. This was weeks before the Panguil Bay Bridge grabbed the capital’s attention.

First, however, a clarification. Panguil Bay Bridge was conceived by the Aquino administration and funded by the South Korean government; it was built under the Duterte administration and completed by the present dispensation.

Why is a clarification necessary? Right after the bridge’s inauguration, bragging acolytes of both the Duterte regime and the present administration were busily grabbing credit for Mindanao’s longest bridge.

Yet, once it became clear that the bridge wasn’t what it was touted to be, embarrassed silence soon descended. Now no one wants to have anything to do with it or hear of it.

Anyway, the government is hoping the matter would go away and is now feverishly patching up the potholes, which one unabashed public works official blamed on the rains and heavy trucks.

But a governor took exception, pointing out that heavy trucks weren’t allowed on the bridge and that his engineers found that when the DPWH engineers laid down the asphalt overlay they didn’t do a crucial step which would ensure the asphalt overlay wouldn’t flake off.

The DPWH officials conveniently forget that restoring the bridge to its original condition isn’t the main point.

In this case, the point is that the Panguil Bay Bridge now stands for the massive public cynicism over government public works projects and the unabated corruption of the officials and agencies that build them.

Symptomatic of this immense public disgust is the way most of us are resigned to being helpless against corruption.

It also doesn’t help any that the present dispensation isn’t visibly taking drastic steps to stamp out corruption in our public works.

No senior public works officials, for example, have publicly come out to say they are seriously doing something about the well-founded revelation of four years ago that construction companies involved in the Duterte regime’s massive “Build! Build! Build!” projects alloted up to 35 percent of their budgets to pay off government officials and employees.

(The 35-percent cut, by the way, is triple the 12-percent cut of the contract price politicians demanded for public works projects in the previous decade).

At any rate, the high cost of corruption results in the use of low-quality raw materials and short-handed labor in public works projects. A point news reports nowadays often gleefully illustrate when reporting on substandard flood control infrastructure, some of which remain unfinished, in various localities that immediately collapsed after the typhoons last month.

No less true is the charge that there are no concerted efforts by current DPWH officials to inform us that they are hard at work at insulating and isolating infrastructure projects from political intervention, particularly in remote regions.

Unabated political intervention, in fact, regrettably evolved years ago, as one eight-year-old investigative report found, into a mafia-like syndicate involving politicians and public works officials.

By now, such syndicated operations are presumably so well-entrenched that it would hardly be surprising if the yet unnamed DPWH contractor who laid down the Panguil Bay Bridge asphalt overlay turns out to be a standing syndicate member.