Driving with the fishes

Go figure. A P55-million farm-to-market road in Quezon whose coordinates place it near Brunei. Another road, worth P30 million and meant for Cebu, is in the Celebes Sea. A third, P23 million, for Nueva Ecija, traverses the waters of Benham Rise.

The farmers, one assumes, will be delivering fresh lettuce to the fish. How about some bananas, as there’s plenty to go around. Again, the Marcos government — and by that we do not just mean all the President’s men in the Executive, but also his minions in Congress — is once again taking us, Filipinos, for fools.

This week, the People’s Budget Coalition told senators it had flagged 7,054 projects worth P190 billion allegedly inserted by the House into the Department of Agriculture’s 2027 budget.

Then, business groups cited more than 350 farm-to-market roads worth nearly P6 billion with their coordinates at sea, and some buildings plotted — in Algeria and Nigeria. The latter’s a joke, if you will.

Now, let’s not even look at that Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism report showing the proposed 2027 budget is riddled (so what else is new?) with pork, the kind that lines the pockets of the hopelessly corrupt.

Notice what nobody disputes: the coordinates are wrong for what the comical lawyer Edward Chico derided as the “farm-to-ocean” roads. The explanation on offer is they are typos. Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian said he was sure of it. Agriculture Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr. allowed that errors in entering coordinates could be responsible.

Come on! Consider what a “typo” actually concedes.

Coordinates in the Celebes Sea is an error you can catch. It is absurd on its face, but someone with a map found it. The mistakes that should worry us are the ones that put a road two towns over, or on a mountainside, or on a private lot, where no one would look twice.

If the detectable errors number in the hundreds, the honest question is how many undetectable ones sit quietly in the same document. The typo defense does not shrink the problem; it describes its floor.

Meanwhile, buck-passing is in vogue anew. Deputy Speaker Ronaldo Puno says executive agencies should answer for errors in the budget they submitted. Perhaps. But we, the taxpayers, do not care which branch fumbled.

A proposal passes through agency, committee, plenary, and bicameral conference, and at every stage someone signs it forward. A system in which each stage can say “verification isn’t my job” is not a system of checks. It is a relay race where everyone runs a leg and no one is carrying the baton.

We know where unverified public works can lead. The flood control scandal showed that money can be appropriated for projects that exist on paper and not on the ground. Nobody is saying these roads are ghost projects — not yet, but gnawing at this Contrarian is the feeling that we are getting there.

So the remedy is not another explanation from Puno or Tiu or Marcos himself. It’s verification.

Publish the coordinates and original project documents for every farm-to-market road in the 2027 budget. Name who proposed each entry, who validated it, and who approved it. Require independent geotagging before the budget is passed, not after a watchdog found the mistakes.

Until then, the benefit of the doubt is out of stock. Typos, our arse.