Malacañang’s sinister silence

For months, Filipinos demanded answers to the scandal-plagued flood control projects that wasted billions while leaving communities drowning every rainy season.

They were promised an independent probe. What they got instead was a toothless commission — and now, a presidential stonewall.

On the very last day of the Independent Commission for Infrastructure, a senior figure close to the body stepped forward and delivered a damning verdict in plain sight.

He revealed that the final report, the product of months of work and P41 million in public funds, had been handed over exclusively to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

No other member of the ICI even possesses a copy. The commission itself refused to release it. The executive branch alone holds the power, and the duty, to make it public.

Malacañang has done nothing. The reasons for this paralysis are as infuriating as they are obvious. The ICI was deliberately crippled from the start. It was denied contempt powers and legal immunity for its findings.

Investigators could not compel evidence, could not name names without fear of libel suits and therefore could not produce the conclusive proof the public craved.

As the source explained, the commission essentially “gave up” because it lacked the tools the government itself routinely wields.

The result: a report that, by all accounts, contains little that is not already in the public domain. Still, Malacañang is withholding it.

This is not caution but concealment. The congressman who confronted the ICI on its final day put it bluntly: the Filipino people have a right to know who is at fault for the anomalous flood control projects.

The public waited through broken promises, delayed budgets and the quiet disbandment of a commission whose staff of more than 40 contract workers were left jobless the very next day.

The office lights were literally broken; the mood, he said, was one of demoralization. No press briefing. No summary of findings.

Just an abrupt end and a report locked inside the Palace. Even the transcripts of the ICI’s questioning sessions, potentially the most revealing record of all, remain sealed.

The congressman pleaded for their eventual release, noting that the public deserves far more than the sanitized silence now emanating from Malacañang.

President Marcos Jr. has repeatedly positioned himself as a champion of transparency and good governance. Yet when a government-created body completes its mandate and hands him its only copy of the findings, he chooses silence.

This is not leadership; it is the quiet burial of accountability. Every day the report remains hidden is another day the public is told that flood victims, taxpayers and concerned citizens simply do not matter as much as protecting whoever may be held accountable by its contents, which is questionable.

Malacañang’s refusal is an insult to every Filipino who has ever lost a home to floodwaters or watched infrastructure funds vanish into thin air.

The ICI may have been under-resourced and legally hobbled, but the Palace suffers from no such handicap.

It has every legal right and moral obligation to release the report immediately. The public clamor has not faded. It has only grown louder.

The longer Malacañang withholds the document, the clearer it becomes: this is not about protecting the integrity of an investigation. It is about protecting the powerful from the truth.

Release the ICI report. Now. The Filipino people have waited long enough.