Drowning accountability
It is a mystery where the money for a specific classroom goes; only that some large sum exists somewhere in the spending plan for classrooms.
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It is a mystery where the money for a specific classroom goes; only that some large sum exists somewhere in the spending plan for classrooms.
While the fate of one public official is decided on the evening news, the machinery of public plunder exposed by the flood-control scandal keeps running undisturbed in broad daylight.
Skepticism is rising like floodwater. Many are asking: Who is watching public money? Who is counting every peso the government spends?
Congress is now debating the 2027 national budget, which is already emerging pockmarked with pre-election pork, prompting another question: Will the theft of public funds ever stop?
The honest answer is no — not while the same people who benefit from the darkness are the ones deciding how much light to let in.
The last flood-control budget ran to P1.8 trillion over a decade. A former Department of Public Works and Highways secretary says the real cost of the master river-basin plans should have been P800 to P900 billion, but projects inserted by congressmen with no basis in any plan into the budget ran into trillions of pesos.
These were hidden in yearly budgets so tangled across nine versions and a thousand pages that no ordinary citizen can trace a single peso from proposal to spending.
The proposed 2027 budget carries P735 billion in what watchdogs call pork. Hard pork, or infrastructure without feasibility studies, nothing a citizen could check, totaled P483 billion.
Soft pork, the ayuda handed out in cash to citizens in exchange for patronage, is estimated at P140 billion.
Shadow pork, the Unprogrammed Appropriations (UA) that served as the flood-control scandal’s back door, totaled P112 billion. Local pork, through budget items such as the Local Government Support Fund, swelled to P59 billion.
Complicity runs through Congress and the Executive. The Department of Education gets the largest allocation in the budget, yet the classroom shortage does not shrink. Nobody can say why, because the department will not publish its allocation list.
It is a mystery where the money for a specific classroom goes; only that some large sum exists somewhere in the spending plan for classrooms. Communities wait for buildings the budget claims should already be built.
Even the Office of the President, asked to defend its own budget request, saw its allocation for discretionary funds reduced, but the chamber then ended further scrutiny and called it courtesy.
Courtesy is not accountability. It is the same institutional wink that let P1.8 trillion vanish into flood-control projects that never held water.
The transport budget shows the same instinct. Allocations for busways, sidewalks and public transport service contracting, all promised in speeches, arrive at nearly zero in the actual numbers.
None of the previous manipulations will end until the people at the top change. As long as the same traditional politicians hold the levers of power, transparency will remain a promise and be abandoned in the bicameral conference committee.
The public does not lack the will to demand better, but it lacks the access to see clearly enough to demand it.
Watch where the noise is loudest. The impeachment trial and the continuing efforts against political foes, including Vice President Sara Duterte, dominate the front pages and the airwaves.
Senator-judges maneuver around a 16-vote threshold. Lawyers spar over procedure. The country watches, transfixed, as if this were the only reckoning that mattered.
Meanwhile, in a committee room with far fewer cameras, Congress is deciding how to spend the nation’s money for 2027.
Almost no one is watching, which is precisely how it was designed.
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