‘Aswang’ classrooms?

The DPWH now finds itself at the center of another breach of trust: 1,000 classrooms, ceremoniously “turned over” to the DepEd, now supposedly stand as “incomplete” hollow shells, paint peeling before it had dried, wires coiled as hazards on bare floors, doors opening to rooms unfit for any lesson or child.

To call them classrooms is to commit an act of fraud. The scandal lies in the “performance of completion,” the pompous ceremonies of handover where officials clasp hands and pronounce the work done.

It is the lie of finality, staged with practiced ease, that wounds as deeply as any absent coat of paint.

Education Secretary Sonny Angara said it is not entirely a “ghost project,” unlike some of the ones paraded as SoNA triumphs until engineers from Bulacan, under oath, revealed their foundations were built on sand.

Angara’s DepEd, weary of inheriting ruins disguised as schools, launched a formal audit to verify whether they were, in fact, fully paid for.

Relevant officials are ordered to explain in exhaustive detail their farce of progress tested against the stubborn facts of paintless walls and dangling wires.

Only last week, Assistant Secretary Aurelio Bartolome circulated a memorandum to flag prolonged stoppages, incomplete deliveries and structural defects. Consolidate the reports. Pursue corrective action. Accountability. It demands. Then the Cocopea.

One hopes faintly skeptically that these commands will not dissolve into bureaucracy’s habitual inertia as just another scandal folder in a crowded cabinet.

Angara proposes a shift: let the LGUs assume the work. They, he suggests, possess the means, motivation, and, at least occasionally, the ingenuity that a bloated national bureaucracy cannot seem to muster.

Civil society, too, and private organizations. They may be summoned into the breach to raise classrooms with startling efficiency, sometimes with voluntary labor and none of the fanfare, a contrast. What government builds at millions per room, communities sometimes achieve with modest sums and borrowed hands.

But improvisation, however noble, is not accountability. And without accountability, the cycle repeats: ceremonies of completion masking unfinished rooms, ribbons cut on hollow promises, a nation forever building but never arriving.

One might consider the pecuniary dimensions: between P2 million and P3.7 million for a single classroom, a sum that might otherwise endow libraries, laboratories, or even modest scholarships sufficient to elevate the prospects of a generation.

The intended provision of approximately 4,869 new classrooms in the coming annum scarcely grazes the scale of need.

Then you note that progress measured in such minuscule increments against monumental deficit is less a policy than a pantomime of governance.

To bridge the glaring deficiency, DepEd will petition Congress for funds to finish the ones already “delivered” by the DPWH in name only.

Beyond the P928.52 billion already proposed for 2026, he urges the law to shift an additional P134.5 billion into education’s hollow purse.

You may hear the tired rationalizations about priorities and the tangled knots of procurement law: the language of complicity. Because when money is appropriated, when ribbons are cut, when signatures are affixed, the work must match the promise.

For the same agency now under fire has been here before. Yesterday, DPWH “whistleblower” Brice Hernandez declared that every flood project in the province’s first district was substandard by design.

The drawings, we are told, were grand line-upon-line arches of ambition. The build: a pared-down skeleton, the excess quietly shaved, and the difference unaccounted for.

If the testimony holds, the question is whether every DepEd classroom, bridge, every dike, road, every wall built under the DPWH seal deserves the same suspicion. And if suspicion is warranted, then your complacency is a crime.