A genuine fight against corruption, then, must be a whole-of-nation effort. It needs provincial offices with teeth, digital public bidding that closes the room where deals are cut, and a citizenry that watches its own local projects as closely as it watches national headlines.
When Ombudsman Jesus Crispin Remulla stood at the Mananga River flood control project in Talisay City on 10 August, the point was not the photograph — it was the location.
For six years, roughly P60 billion flowed into flood control in Cebu, yet the water still rises. A quarter of that amount went to a single district; another quarter to a single entity. Those are not Metro Manila numbers. They are Cebu’s, and they demand that the Office of the Ombudsman show up where the damage is felt.
That presence matters because the Ombudsman is, by constitutional design, a national office. Its mandate does not thin out past the boundaries of the National Capital Region. Yet public attention — and too often institutional gravity — has clustered around Metro Manila, as if corruption were a metropolitan disease. It is not.
The same probe that begins in Cebu now reaches Eastern Visayas, Bohol, Tacloban, Negros Oriental, Antique and Iloilo. The rot is distributed; the response must be too.
Being national is more than travel. It means resourcing the regions to do the work. The plan to deploy twenty more lawyers to the Ombudsman-Visayas matters more than any inspection tour, because it treats a regional office as a place where cases are built and won — not a branch that forwards paperwork to the capital.
An accountability system that hoards its best people in Manila will always trail corruption that has learned to operate everywhere else.
The Cebu visit also models the right method: systemic, not personality-driven. The investigation does not open with a list of names. It opens with a structure — the DPWH regional director, the district engineers, the contractors, the bidding process itself. It asks whether projects were designed to fail, double-counted on paper, or never built at all, and it uses digital tools to verify coordinates on the ground.
That is how you move from scandal to reform: by fixing the machinery that produces ghost projects, not merely naming the ghosts.
A genuine fight against corruption, then, must be a whole-of-nation effort. It needs provincial offices with teeth, digital public bidding that closes the room where deals are cut, and a citizenry that watches its own local projects as closely as it watches national headlines.
The certainty of punishment — felt in Cebu as surely as in Manila — is what deters the next inflated contract.
Cebu should not be the exception to how this office works. It should be the standard. Corruption does not confine itself to the capital, and neither should the office sworn to fight it.
