Nosy Tarsee points to a colossal hole in the mountains east of Metro Manila. It is the mouth of a tunnel that was supposed to save a megacity from thirst. What it has become instead is something closer to a monument to wishful thinking, geopolitical entanglement, and the quiet fury of people who have lived in those mountains for centuries and never once asked to be saved.
The project was signed into existence by a president infamous for his coziness with a foreign power. In exchange for a loan denominated in the hundreds of millions of dollars, at terms that made even sympathetic economists wince, a state-owned contractor from that same foreign nation was handed the keys to one of the most ecologically sensitive watersheds in the archipelago.
No open bidding. No local competition. The contract, locals would later learn, was written in the lender’s language, adjudicated under the lender’s laws and shielded by a sovereign immunity waiver that essentially let the borrowing nation’s assets be seized in the event of a default.
Critics called it onerous. Some called it worse.
After years of construction, the project has inched past a quarter of completion. Costs have ballooned by the billions in the local currency, with bureaucrats quietly approving budget increases while insisting the fundamentals are sound, for beneficial reasons.
Meanwhile, the foreign power has been peeling itself away from the host country’s infrastructure dreams with increasing speed, having already exited two railway deals and declining to fund a major rail corridor after tensions flared over contested waters.
The contractor’s machines reportedly went quiet at the mountain site for a stretch last year, the workers invited to relocate to a job elsewhere in the country. Whether that was a pause or a preview remains the subject of anxious speculation.
The indigenous communities that have lived along the river for generations continue to fight. They have marched in loincloths to provincial capitols, signed petitions by the tens of thousands, and stood before cameras holding up signs in a language the contractors do not speak.
They say the reservoir will swallow their homes, their sacred sites, their dead. One tribal leader put it plainly — before anyone negotiates over their land, they should at least have the dignity of being spoken to first.
Academics have since raised the specter of a “white elephant.” The loan clock, meanwhile, keeps ticking regardless of how many liters don’t flow.
Nobody, at this point, seems entirely sure who is in charge of this project’s fate — the government agency nominally running it, the foreign lender whose money was barely drawn down for years, the contractor whose commitment has visibly wavered, or the mountain itself, which has a well-documented habit of flooding everything in its path when the monsoon comes.
