To control floods, corruption, abolish DPWH

Abolish the Department of Public Works and Highways. For two reasons: 1) it is the biggest source of rampant corruption in government. It is today the Philippines’ biggest criminal enterprise. 2) it is the biggest reason why 15 million Filipinos remain dirt poor.

With the DPWH out of the picture, the government should simply auction its flood control projects via PPP – public-private partnership style. The government designs the flood project, estimates its cost, determines its completion period and then offers it to bidders. The one who quotes the best price wins the contract and the government pays the winner on a cost-plus basis.

In the past 15 years, according to Sen. Panfilo Lacson, P1 trillion of the P2 trillion allotted for flood control was stolen. That’s 1,000-billion pesos down the drain. And into the pockets of senators, congressmen, contractors, DPWH officials, audit people and other greedy government people.

The P1 trillion lost to corruption could have rescued at least five million families from poverty – the four of every 10 Filipinos who don’t earn $3 a day, the World Bank measure of poverty. The P1 trillion is more than double the P440 billion DepEd Secretary Sonny Angara needs to build 165,000 classrooms to improve quality of education of our young, our best capital.

Four things thus happen, without the DPWH: we curb corruption, we control floods, we reduce poverty and we make our young more useful and intelligent. The exact formula for a progressive country.

I make this demand after watching the televised hearings of the Senate Blue Ribbon anti-graft committee Monday, Aug. 18. The disclosures so far are simply disgusting, outrageous, revolting. Projects go to grossly under-capitalized and incompetent contractors who don’t finish or who bungle the job.

The looting of the P1 trillion of flood control money could not have happened without the connivance and active partnership of DPWH – its top officials, regional and district engineers and project engineers.

In two towns and a city of Bulacan, P5 billion worth of ghost projects were certified completed by DPWH officials.

According to a chart presented by Sen. Erwin Tulfo at the hearing, from 2015 to 2026, the DPWH has been allotted a total of P663.9 billion – almost 664 thousand millions of pesos. Erwin’s brother, Sen. Raffy Tulfo, cites the DPWH Region IV-B (Mindoro, Marinduque, Romblon, Palawan) where the regional DPWH director (a certain Gerald Pacanan) gets access to P20 billion of flood control projects and only 13.5 percent, P2.7 billion, ends up being spent for the projects.

A big chunk of the P20 billion, 28 percent or P5.6 billion, goes to the project proponent (presumably from the Senate and the House), P5 billion to Pacanan himself plus a share of the actual construction budget. Pacanan, said Tulfo, is a contractor himself, despite being the DPWH Region IV-B district engineer.

In a separate development, Pacanan was seen on video announcing the firing of the government project engineer and the entire DPWH team in a botched flood control project in Naujan, Mindoro awarded to St. Timothy Construction Corp. I emailed Pacanan about Senator Raffy’s allegations against him. No response yet at this writing.

The President has asked the same St. Timothy Construction for an explanation over its failure to rehabilitate a river-protection structure in Barangay Bulusan, Calumpit, Bulacan. “We need to hold them accountable and ask why they did it tahis way,” he said in Filipino. “It would be better if they came here themselves to see the hardship they’ve caused our fellow citizens,” Marcos Jr. fumed in Filipino. The project cost P96.3 million and was claimed to have been completed by 2023. It was not. “Nothing was really installed,” the President observed. According to Pasig Mayor Vico Sotto, St. Timothy (with 105 projects worth P7.3 billion) is one of the three large construction companies of the husband-and-wife tandem Pacifico “Curlee” Discaya II and Sarah Discaya, the two others being Alpha & Omega Gen. Contractor & Development Corp., the nation’s second largest flood control contractor (with P7.5 billion contracts), and St. Gerrard Construction (listed owner: Cezarah Cruz-Discaya). In 2020, the DPWH blacklisted St. Gerrard as a contractor but the company still managed to bag DPWH projects.

For 2026, the BBM administration has P1.556 trillion for infrastructure (including flood control), five percent of the size of the economy. Of the P1.55 trillion, a record P881.3 billion will go to the DPWH.

Of its P881.3 billion, DPWH will spend P274 billion for flood control – its greatest single year spending for flood control. From 2015 to 2025, 11 years, DPWH got a cumulative total of P1.365 trillion for flood control, nationwide – all for nothing. The floods came just the same, with flood levels and damage even worse than before.

The breakdown of the DPWH flood control budget per year: 2015, P42.2 billion; 2016, P58.9 billion; 2017, P72.9 billion; 2018, P127.3 billion; 2019, P90.7 billion; 2020, P90.1 billion; 2021, P101.8 billion; 2022, P128.9 billion; 2023, P182.9 billion; 2024, P244.5 billion and 2025, P248 billion.

For three years, 2023 to 2025, flood control budget totaled P675.4 billion – half of the P1.3 trillion budgeted for flood control in the past 11 years. This means half of the flood control money of the past 11 years was stolen under the Marcos Jr. administration. No wonder the President is fuming. “Mahiya naman kayo!” he told the contractors during his SONA July 28. Marcos should have hollered: “Mga walanghiya kayo!”

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Happy birthday to one of the finest and best First Ladies ever, Louise Araneta Marcos. A law professor and a lawyer, extremely gracious and warm, LAM brings elegance, style, focus, hard work and governance ethics to a role that is often misunderstood. She is a strong woman and strong-willed. She knows how to fight and fight back.

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