Reckoning season
Every heavy downpour that threatens to submerge the streets rekindles public rage over the substandard projects that President Ferdinand Marcos himself supposedly exposed.
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Every heavy downpour that threatens to submerge the streets rekindles public rage over the substandard projects that President Ferdinand Marcos himself supposedly exposed.
Nature has a foolproof way of reminding Filipinos of the travesty inflicted on them by the flood control scandal. This brazen scheme has stolen an estimated P1 trillion from the national budget since the Marcos administration took power.
Every heavy downpour that threatens to submerge the streets, with the entry of the southwestern monsoon or habagat, rekindles public rage over the substandard projects that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. himself supposedly exposed.
What is now widely regarded as one of the most brazen corruption schemes in recent Philippine history centers on the systematic plunder of flood control funds.
An estimated P42.3 billion to P118.5 billion per year was lost to flood control corruption since 2023, with the scale of illegal wealth accrued by contractors and politicians from public funds leaving many Filipinos outraged and dispirited.
The cumulative figure, often cited as exceeding P1 trillion, encompasses the broader pattern of budget inflation, contractor monopolies, ghost projects and kickbacks involving individuals in both the private and public sectors, including those tasked with providing effective oversight, spanning the period from 2016 to 2025.
In his third State of the Nation Address on 22 July 2024, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. highlighted the completion of 5,500 flood control projects and the construction of similar infrastructure nationwide. But the flooding that immediately followed, caused by Typhoon Carina striking during and after his speech, exposed the hollowness of his claims and planted the seeds of public fury.
More than a year later, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council reported that 31 people had died due to typhoons and the rain-inducing habagat
An estimated six-million Filipinos were directly affected by the bad weather.
Marcos, in his fourth State of the Nation Address on 28 July 2025, condemned the collusion between government officials and private contractors to defraud Filipinos of more than a trillion pesos in flood control funds and life-saving infrastructure, including dikes, revetments, dams and spillways.
“Shame on you,” he had bellowed.
Marcos later stated during a live report to the nation that it was “disturbing” that P100 billion, or approximately 20 percent of the P545-billion flood control budget from July 2022 to May 2025, had been awarded to just 15 contractors.
Public outrage exploded into the streets, symbolized by the Trillion Peso March on 21 September 2025.
An Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI) was created to conduct a broader probe. Under Executive Order 94, signed by Marcos, the ICI was mandated to probe infrastructure irregularities nationwide over the past decade.
What followed was a growing and damning body of testimony, Cabinet-level resignations and structural evidence that suggested the trail of accountability led straight to Malacañang.
The most explosive allegations came from a man on the run. Former Ako Bicol Partylist Representative Elizaldy “Zaldy” Co, a key figure in the scandal, released a video statement on 14 November 2025 admitting to inserting around P100 billion into the 2025 national budget and claiming the directive had come directly from President Marcos and former Speaker Martin Romualdez.
Co alleged that Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman had told him that the President wanted P100 billion worth of insertions in the 2025 General Appropriations Act.
Days after Co’s explosive statement, Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin and Pangandaman resigned, with Malacañang saying that they stepped down “out of delicadeza” (a sense of propriety).
That an unprecedented torrent of public money flowed through the Department of Public Works and Highways in just three years raised unavoidable doubts.
Did the executive branch exercise any meaningful supervision, or was the system deliberately left open to plunder?
Critics argued that the ICI was itself compromised. Its independence from the President was suspect, they noted, given that it was created by executive fiat.
All of that recrimination and outrage resurfaces with every downpour.
