Reckoning stops short

Reckoning stops short | Daily Tribune

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has spent a year positioning himself as the exposer of “Floodgate,” not a subject of it, but the paper trail does not cooperate with such a narrative.

He signed the budget. His own spokesperson insisted that he turned every page that crossed his desk before signing it, which puts him in the middle of the budget diversion worth hundreds of billions, even a trillion pesos by some estimates, funneled through ghost and substandard flood control projects.

Either the President did not actually scrutinize the budget he claims to have pored over, or he did, and the diversion happened in plain sight. No option simply leaves him blameless.

What has happened instead is a year of selective accountability. Low and mid-level Department of Public Works and Highways employees, and some token prominent individuals, are in jail.

Members of the Senate and the House of Representatives repeatedly named in the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee hearings remain seated, unindicted. Some have made it as senator-judges or are presiding over the impeachment proceedings.

The Ombudsman’s case against former Speaker Martin Romualdez — filed days before the President’s fifth State of the Nation (SoNA) address, the timing itself suspicious — is not even a plunder case. It is for graft and corruption, the kind that allows bail while it grudgingly proceeds.

The key whistleblower, former Ako Bicol Representative Zaldy Co, who linked the President to the massive looting of the National Treasury, remains safely overseas without any tangible effort to bring him back home.

Compare that to the speed with which the administration’s political foes have been jailed on comparatively thinner grounds.

The Independent Commission for Infrastructure that Marcos created to investigate the corruption earned no mention in his SoNA. If the ICI’s work mattered to the President’s stated anti-corruption drive, its absence from his flagship speech was inexplicable, unless its findings were never meant to be made public.

The timing tracks uncomfortably with the campaign to remove Vice President Sara Duterte from the 2028 candidate field, using the full force of the state machinery.

Full accountability for Floodgate, the kind that will actually deter the next trillion-peso racket rather than merely punish the relatively small fry implicated in it, will not be obtained while the man who signed the budget is also the one deciding who gets investigated.

It will come, if it comes at all, only when the person at the top is genuinely willing to throw open the books and get to the bottom of the racket built on the perversion of the national budget.

Until then, every claim from the presidential podium of having exposed the Floodgate scandal should be treated the way any seasoned investigator treats a suspiciously well-timed tip: with the grain of salt it deserves.