The Philippines failed Bongbong
Because world-class flood control requires world-class citizens. Everyone disciplined. Nobody litters. Nobody throws anything anywhere. Basically Finland.
Text size
Because world-class flood control requires world-class citizens. Everyone disciplined. Nobody litters. Nobody throws anything anywhere. Basically Finland.
You almost felt sorry for Bongbong.
Looking at him staring at that creek. The disappointment, surprise, the face of a man thinking: “This wasn’t in the SoNA!”
The terrible burden of discovering, four years in the presidency, what kind of people he has been forced to govern.
You can almost hear him: “Look at this garbage. And these people want flood control?” Because he spent P545 billion on flood control, and nobody mentioned that floods occasionally came to the Philippines.
How do you save a country that keeps throwing itself into the creek? Bongbong could part the West Philippine Sea and someone would throw Sunsilk into the opening.
Very unfair. The engineers were promised water. The contractors. Clean water. Water with manners.
Because world-class flood control requires world-class citizens. Everyone disciplined. Nobody litters. Nobody throws anything anywhere. Basically Finland.
Maybe next we will build hospitals that work, provided nobody gets sick.
Bongbong yesterday went to a Pasay pumping station with Secretary Garin. Bongbong: The floods are because of the garbage. Also Bongbong: People have nowhere to put the garbage.
He conducted an investigation, questioned the public, blamed the public, then produced an alibi for the public.
Because if that garbage traveled from somebody’s kitchen, through the neighborhood, into the drain, down the waterway and all the way to that pumping station without the government stopping it anywhere along the way, that is one hell of a successful piece of cr*p.
It defeated the whole chain of government. Bongbong found garbage at the end of the system and blamed the beginning.
The garbage was always there, by the way. But the President looks at it once and — boom! — gets a national insight?
So now we have nowhere to put the garbage. What to do? Naturally: waste-to-energy.
This man is unbelievable. Nothing is allowed to remain a failure around Bongbong. Floodwaters? “Ipunin natin ang baha para magamit sa darating na tagtuyot.” Not for a rainy day, but save it for a searing day.
Yet, with all this creativity, he still has not figured out how to turn the traffic into P20 rice, a winner. Very strange. We have plenty. Of both.
There is a particular sadness in doing everything you can and discovering that everything you can do still has to work on Filipinos. Very difficult people.
Maybe that’s what four years in Malacañang teaches you.
Perhaps Bongbong’s tragedy is not that he misunderstood flood control. He overestimated us, gave the country plans, and the country gave him Sunsilk. There are bad marriages with better communication.
Engineers, pumps, projects, contractors, studies, billions: four years. And, after all of it, you discover the final piece of infrastructure was apparently good behavior.
Nobody bought it. Nobody even put it out for bidding.
There is something heartbreaking about a President discovering the limits of executive power beside a clogged canal.
You command the Armed Forces, veto legislation, reorganize the Cabinet, but can you personally follow 113 million Filipinos around carrying a garbage bag? You cannot. Nobody can. What can you do?
You spend your whole life wanting to become President. Nobody tells you the country comes with the job. Maybe that explains the face at the creek.
Not anger. Recognition. The face of a father who has finally discovered why the living room smells terrible and realizes that every child in the house knew except him.
History has been very unfair to Presidents that way. We always ask: Was the President good enough for the country? Nobody asks whether the country was good enough for the President.
Maybe they did not fail the Filipino. Maybe they ran out of ways to save us from ourselves.
And maybe that is why Bongbong keeps finding second lives for our disasters. Because it’s easier to believe every disaster has another purpose than to admit that the disaster you were supposed to prevent has simply happened again.
That’s sad. Bongbong’s optimism. Give him floods, he sees a dam. Give him garbage, he sees power plants. Give him Filipinos and, somehow, he still sees hope.
