THERE is a cruel irony emerging in our country today. As swollen rivers sweep away homes and drown entire communities, billions of pesos meant to protect them have vanished. They were stolen in plain sight, disguised as “flood control projects.”

Sen. Panfilo “Ping” Lacson’s latest revelations have not merely exposed the rot beneath the veneer of bureaucracy; they have mapped its very anatomy. What he has revealed is a system so intricate and audaciously shameless, where theft is normalized, even systematic. It’s a stark example of “creative corruption” — a more elegant phrase for plunder, which, in Philippine jurisprudence, is a crime deserving life imprisonment.

While ordinary Filipinos wade through waist-deep floods, powerful hands are wading through public coffers. The people lose homes; the corrupt gain houses, not to mention dozens of luxury vehicles — including Bentleys and Rolls Royces — in their garages. The public drowns in despair; syndicates swim in cash.

The mathematics of plunder and a dictionary of deceit

The senator highlights how funds are distributed in a P100-million flood control project. After standard legal deductions, about P82 million should be available for construction. However, a more detailed breakdown reveals that portions go to “dirty little fingers.” The process is a fiscal feeding frenzy, where each actor takes their pre-negotiated cut:

– 8 to 10 percent to Department of Public Works and Highways officials: plain “kickback.”

– 6 percent to district engineers: “reseta” contractors must swallow.

– 5 to 6 percent to the Bids and Awards Committee.

– 0.5 to 1 percent to the Commission on Audit (COA).

– 5 to 6 percent as “parking fees” for politicians who control the districts.

– 20 to 25 percent for the “funder” — the lawmaker who inserts the project into the budget.

What remains is insufficient for constructing a reliable dike, let alone protecting communities from typhoons and their accompanying floods. This goes beyond mere government inefficiency; it is deliberate and systematic theft, planned with precision.

Case studies in betrayal

The consequences of this mathematical plunder are not buried in spreadsheets, but written in the mud and misery of inundated villages across the archipelago. The anecdotal evidence cited by Lacson is not a series of isolated failures, but a pattern of betrayal. In Bulacan, 30 “ghost projects” existing only on paper were funded and disbursed. Reports were filed by the DPWH with the COA’s imprimatur, but not a single stone was laid.

The same insidious pattern is seen in Pampanga, where the flood control project in Candaba town ballooned from P20 million to a staggering P274 million through repeated, never-ending “repairs,” always awarded to the same contractor. A dam was built, but it was designed not to hold water, but to hold plundered funds.

In La Union, the Bauang River Basin — initially a reasonable P100 million in the National Expenditure Program (NEP) — mysteriously swelled to P1.6 billion after congressional insertions. The river did not expand; the greed did, flowing with an unstoppable current. And in Oriental Mindoro, nearly P19 billion in flood control funds over just three years resulted in dikes that collapsed after the first heavy rainfall.

One P193-million project turned out to be a mirage, existing only in documents. These are not isolated anomalies. They are symptoms of a design, a cruel blueprint where corruption is the foundation and collapse in good governance is the inevitable result.

The machinery of patronage

At the heart of this fiscal manipulation lies a powerful machinery of political patronage, where elections are prioritized over genuine infrastructure needs. Ghost projects are not accidents, but tools of power. A lawmaker can boast of a P1-billion insertion in the budget to secure loyalty from local officials and constituents, while mayors and governors overlook shoddy quality in exchange for campaign largesse that ensure their continued reign.

This system is enabled by government agencies themselves. The DPWH, the very entity responsible for upholding engineering standards, often becomes a facilitator of kickbacks. Even the COA, the supposed last line of defense, is alleged to receive its “share” of the spoils.

Contractors, caught between a rock and a hard place, must either comply and become complicit or be left out of the game entirely. The result is a nation held hostage, where political interests consistently outweigh public safety, leaving citizens at risk with every storm.

The legislative triumvirate

The most egregious example of this machinery was executed behind the 2025 General Appropriations Act’s fiscal manipulation by Speaker Martin Romualdez; Ako Bicol Party-list Rep. and House appropriations panel chairman Zaldy Co (also a contractor), and Marikina’s then-representative Stella Quimbo. They allegedly orchestrated one of the most brazen budget insertions, earmarking over P400 billion — nearly half of the trillion-plus national budget — for flood control projects under the DPWH. As of this publication, two dozen House members have been implicated in this corruption (the subject of my next column). These funds didn’t come from nowhere. They were siphoned off from critical social services of the Department of Education and the Philippine Health Insurance Corp., both already battered by chronic underfunding. The money was hidden and rebranded as “climate resilience” initiatives.

A nation drowning twice

Floods damage homes and crops, but corruption undermines trust even more deeply. Each failed project and stolen peso weaken faith in government and democratic institutions.

Flood control should be an act of survival in a country battered by as much as 20 typhoons a year. Instead, it has become an act of betrayal, where the public pays the price while the corrupt pocket the funds. The Philippines is not just drowning in floodwaters; it is drowning in greed.

This loss of trust breeds widespread apathy and despair. When citizens view leaders as corrupt, they feel powerless to effect change, leading to disengagement from civic duties, such as paying taxes or voting. This apathetic despair is the second flood, a rising tide of hopelessness that is far more destructive than any storm.

From flood control to greed control

Lacson’s call for “greed control” deserves more than applause; it demands action. Reforms must begin with budget transparency. Every insertion must be tracked, every contractor scrutinized, every peso accounted for.

Accreditation boards like the Philippine Contractors Accreditation Board (PCAB) must be cleaned out. Whistleblowers must be protected, not silenced. And when ghost projects are exposed, prosecutions must follow swiftly. Preventive suspensions or mere resignations are just bureaucratic theater; they’re mere “moro-moro.”

Most of all, citizens must resist acquiescence. Corruption thrives when outrage drowns in apathy. The floods are not only natural; they are political. And like floods, they will rise again and again unless levees of reform are built.

Lacson has handed the nation not just a report, but a mirror. We should not avert our gaze. Recovering P1.9 trillion is important, but recovering our integrity is even more so. This is not just a fight for clean dikes and stronger floodgates; it is a struggle for the soul of governance itself. To remain silent is to be complicit. To accept this corruption is to admit that the Filipino people will forever drown — sometimes in water, always in greed.

We should respond with our own storm of rage, a flood of our anger!