To be Pinoy is to suffer
It is the ordinary who suffer extraordinary consequences. And when things go wrong, the government points to climate change.
Text size
It is the ordinary who suffer extraordinary consequences. And when things go wrong, the government points to climate change.
16 minutes for Marcos, questions for Sara
Sixteen minutes.
That was apparently enough time for Congress to decide that the Office of the President’s proposed P10.15-billion 2027 budget deserved no further scrutiny.
Thirty-seven voted yes. Five voted no. Calls to scrutinize the OP’s P4.58 billion in confidential and intelligence funds were brushed aside.
The next day, the same appropriations panel took up the Office of the Vice President’s proposed P785.2-million budget. Suddenly, scrutiny mattered.
There was a debate over parliamentary courtesy. There were questions about whether Vice President Sara Duterte should be spared the very examination that lawmakers had declined to give the President.
It would be almost funny if the money were not public funds. The disparity is hard to explain without confronting the obvious.
And this is happening while the Marcos administration is under intense scrutiny over allegations surrounding flood control projects.
Transparency, as ACT Teachers Rep. Antonio Tinio argued, cannot be something Congress demands only from its political opponents.
Perhaps the more uncomfortable question is not why Congress scrutinizes Sara Duterte.
It is why it stopped scrutinizing Marcos so quickly.
Sixteen minutes is not oversight. It is a decision to look away.
— Jason Mago
Borrow, flood, steal, repeat?
The proposal to secure another $200 million from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank for Metro Manila’s “sponge city” project should be judged not only on its engineering merits, but also against the government’s worsening fiscal position and the unresolved failures surrounding flood control spending.
The national government debt was at a record P19.07 trillion at end-June, including P6.23 trillion in external obligations. The Treasury itself has acknowledged the foreign-exchange risks attached to external borrowing, which is why it generally favors domestic financing.
The concern becomes more serious when viewed against history. In 2017, the Philippines embarked on a $500-million Metro Manila Flood Management Project backed by the World Bank and AIIB. Nearly a decade later, its implementation has faced delays, Metro Manila remains severely flood prone, and the government is separately investigating alleged ghost and anomalous flood control projects.
None of this proves that the proposed sponge city program is unsound or corrupt. It does, however, create a higher burden of justification.
Borrowing may be necessary for infrastructure, but debt cannot substitute for accountability.
Before taxpayers are asked to shoulder another foreign obligation, the government should establish what previous flood control loans accomplished, where implementation failed, who was responsible for those failures, and what safeguards will prevent new financing from falling into the same cycle of delay, waste, and corruption.
The issue, therefore, is not whether Metro Manila needs better flood control. It plainly does.
The issue is whether government has earned the confidence to borrow for it again. — Carl Magadia
It is we who suffer the most
Being Filipino in the Philippines is hard. Sometimes, it is in your own home that you experience the worst failures meant to protect you.
The past few days have been another reminder that being ordinary here often means being at the bottom.
It is ordinary Filipinos who suffer the most — those who work simply to sustain their families, those whose dreams amount to nothing more than having a slightly more comfortable life.
It is worth noting that during pounding rains, you rarely hear the wealthy complain.
No powerful official was stuck for nearly a day on NLEX. No high-ranking personality had to wade through deep floods in Pampanga. You rarely see the well-connected suffer the way ordinary people do when disaster strikes.
They have ways out. The ordinary Filipino does not.
A man died after falling into a flooded, open drainage canal in Angeles City. In Tarlac, people were killed and others went missing after a bridge collapsed and an SUV plunged into the river.
Every year, the same stories: of drowning, landslides, floods, collapsed infrastructure.
It is the ordinary who suffer extraordinary consequences. And when things go wrong, the government points to climate change.
Climate change may explain the rain. It does not explain why Filipinos remain this vulnerable to it.
When floods rise, the government resorts to prayers when people need action.
More than a year into the flood control scandal, Filipinos are still waiting for the kind of accountability that will put the powerful behind bars.
There is also little public interest in the impeachment trial. Perhaps because many Filipinos already assume they know how these things end.
The Philippines has become very good at making its own people feel powerless. And perhaps that is the greatest tragedy of all.
It is not only that we suffer the most. We have been made to believe that enduring is all we can do.
-Vivienne Angeles
