Resign, Dizon tells underlings

Newly appointed Public Works and Highways Secretary Vince Dizon on Monday demanded the courtesy resignations of all the senior officials at the agency as part of an anti-corruption drive ordered by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Dizon, who replaced Manuel Bonoan, took his oath of office before Marcos at Malacañang, where the President told him to “clean up the DPWH.”

In a Palace briefing, Dizon said the resignations will cover undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, division heads, regional directors, and district engineers nationwide. The move, he said, will allow for a full review of all agency personnel.

“I believe there are many good and capable employees in the DPWH. Our President’s order is to find them and place them in sensitive and important positions,” he said.

He said the reshuffle would be based on the talents and capabilities of employees and would expose those complicit in irregularities.

“These kinds of projects would not exist if there was no collusion within the DPWH. When a project is a fantasy, a ‘ghost project’ as our President said, it is not possible that no one in the DPWH signed off on those projects,” Dizon said. “Our President’s order is to find those people and remove them from office and prosecute them.”

Banned

Dizon said contractors proven to have participated in anomalous flood control projects would face lifetime bans.

“If a contractor’s project is a ghost or proven to be substandard, there will no longer be a process, no more investigation, that contractor is automatically blacklisted for life,” he said.

He warned that contractors attempting to bypass the ban by renaming their companies would be investigated by an independent commission tasked to pursue their accountability.

PCAB review

Dizon said he will also push for a review of the Philippine Contractors Accreditation Board (PCAB), an attached agency of the Department of Trade and Industry that accredits construction firms.

Senator Panfilo Lacson earlier flagged possible conflicts of interest within the PCAB, noting that some board members owned construction companies with government contracts.

Among them are EGB Construction Corp., owned by board member Erni Baggao, and AN Escalante Construction Inc., owned by Arthur Escalante. Baggao remains with PCAB.

Dizon said he would ask the DTI for help in addressing the issue.

The new secretary acknowledged that eliminating corruption in the DPWH will take time.

“This is a decades-long problem, not a year, it’s not a year that counts here, this is a decades-long, like that. So, it really needs sweeping. The President said, sweep everything,” he said.

“We need to address that right away. It’s not easy. There’s no miracle here. There’s no silver bullet. There’s no tomorrow that everything will be okay. This will take time because it has taken decades for this to build up like this. But we have to start somewhere,” he added.

Dizon said he plans to meet with other agencies and local governments to coordinate flood control measures after heavy rains recently inundated parts of Metro Manila.

Senator Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan expressed support for Dizon, saying the Senate is ready to work with him.