OPINION
Nine of 10 are crooked
Roughly a quarter-million infrastructure projects were flagged as potentially anomalous since 2016. Thirty thousand of those for flood control alone.
Ninety percent. That is the figure a member of the Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI) gave, based on his accounting of members of Congress who are immersed in corrupt ways.
It is the usual business in Congress, running since long before Zaldy Co’s racket packed in suitcases was exposed. The parking fee, for instance, a euphemism for lawmakers’ cut in the take on public works, had “become a system” that gets protected, nursed, handed down to other members of political clans. Roughly a quarter-million infrastructure projects were flagged as potentially anomalous since 2016. Thirty thousand of those for flood control alone. Each case — from field investigation to Ombudsman filing to preliminary investigation — takes the better part of a year to move an inch.
At that pace, the Ombudsman will still be building cases when toddlers of the political families involved will be old enough to steal budgets of their own.
And still we perform the ritual. A former speaker goes on livestream, hand on heart, conscience allegedly spotless, and promises to name names.
Meanwhile, a senator sits comfortably unreachable for months and the country absorbs the lesson that the law moves at two speeds — glacial, cushioned, negotiable for the powerful; while for everyone else, instant.
A barangay tanod pockets the petty cash and finds himself in a holding cell immediately.
A senator pockets a nation’s flood defenses and remains a free man doing television interviews touting his conscience. No one should be above the law, we say, like praying before a meal that is laced with poison.
Out of more than 1,600 mayors in this country, barely two hundred have bothered to join a coalition explicitly organized around the radical proposition to not steal.
The investigation of the ICI, despite its emasculation, into the corruption surrounding flood control projects found a “highly syndicated” and “well-organized” operation, with the scale of the anomalies involving powerful figures across the government.
The investigation was heading toward a finding that the scheme to steal public funds could not have been orchestrated by a single official nor was it confined to the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).
It was impossible, for instance, that then DPWH Secretary Manuel Bonoan alone made the decisions in the Floodgate scandal.
The network extended to the legislative and executive branches, as the ICI member claimed that members of the House and Senate and executive branch officials participated in the scheme.
The breadth of the network would explain why these officials appeared confident that they would be protected.
The corruption scheme went beyond isolated kickbacks and rogue officials — which was common in the Priority Development Assistance Fund anomaly — but instead depended on coordination among people occupying different positions in government.
The process of allocating and releasing infrastructure funds indicated that multiple government actors would have had to be involved. Questioned allocations would pass through different stages of the bureaucracy, while the release of funds would require action by the Department of Budget and Management.
The ICI also got hold of the so-called “Cabral files,” documents that showed dramatic increases in infrastructure allocations for certain congressional districts.
Some allocations originally appearing in the National Expenditure Program subsequently ballooned by billions of pesos. When then DPWH undersecretary Maria Catalina Cabral was confronted about the figures and asked who had instructed her to make the changes, she pointed to Bonoan.
Uncovering the full extent of the scandal, thus, would require investigators to look beyond individual contractors and DPWH personnel and to determine how decisions moved through the bureaucracy and political establishment.
The flood control racket was a coordinated system involving individuals with access to appropriations, fund releases and project implementations, a network that reached across major institutions of government.
A whole-of-government approach would have been required to undertake the monumental heist.