With the continuing heavy monsoon rains and flooding, there are people who worry about where to get the money to patch up roofs that are leaking and repair floors and furniture that have been damaged.
Meanwhile, lawmakers and other public officials are safe and cozy in their mansions, busy finding creative ways of getting kickbacks and pocketing gazillions of our hard-earned taxes for their ever-expanding real estate properties, fleets of luxury vehicles and regular overseas junkets. If they’re not depositing the money in their bank accounts (with some, like the looter king, in Swiss banks), they’re claiming personal credit for the disbursement of our taxes.
The suffering that the thieves have inflicted on millions of people is criminal. This is on top of their widely suspected crime of conniving to pocket public funds from substandard or ghost projects.
For those wondering where nearly P2 trillion over the past decade in flood control projects went, just check out the parking areas of the Senate and the House of Representatives, or Google their addresses for a glimpse into their mansions.
The latest revelation about how lawmakers aggrandize themselves at our expense came from former public works chief Manuel Bonoan, who himself is accused of plunder over flood control kickbacks.
Bonoan told the Sandiganbayan that all 24 senators in the previous 19th Congress were each allotted P500 million worth of projects for their discretionary earmarking under the annual national budget. The chairs of key committees such as public works got up to P1 billion in public funds at their disposal, for which they could take personal credit.
Any way you look at it, this so-called “leadership fund” is exactly the same Priority Development Assistance Fund with a different collar.
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Remember the PDAF? It’s the congressional pork barrel that the Supreme Court had struck down as unconstitutional following the scandal that has so far netted only scam implementer Janet Lim-Napoles and a smattering of political minnows who can’t afford the best justice that money can buy.
The Senate president at the time of the scandal, martial law architect Juan Ponce Enrile, was buried with military honors at the heroes’ cemetery after serving as chief legal counsel of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. JPE and his former chief of staff Jessica Lucila “Gigi” Reyes were cleared by the Sandiganbayan of plunder and graft over the alleged misuse of his P172.83 million in PDAF.
So far, the senators of the previous Congress have not denied the allocation of the leadership fund, although several members of the current minority bloc have bemoaned that in their case, their requests for funding for their projects were withheld and labeled “for later release.”
We have yet to find out if even a drop in the bucket of that P500 million each (P1 billion for the committee chairs) went to a flood control project that actually mitigated flooding.
Residents in certain areas in Metro Manila have complained that flooding in their communities actually worsened after projects labeled as flood control interventions were implemented.
These included laying concrete on the creek bed instead of dredging the waterway, and building concrete retention walls along riverbanks without provisions for street runoff to make the structure work for flood mitigation.
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Flood control in Metro Manila calls for an integrated master plan. It cannot be a patchwork response developed by each of the local government units (LGUs).
San Juan Mayor Francis Zamora, president of the Metro Manila Council, told “Storycon” yesterday on One News that such a master plan is still being studied, including the upgrading and expansion of aging drainage systems and water pumping stations.
In the meantime, he said the freeze on flood control projects remains in place. The authority over flood control projects is centralized in the DPWH and, in Metro Manila, the MMDA, although drainage and waterway cleanups can be undertaken by LGUs.
Flood control technology is not new. The Netherlands, which is highly vulnerable to flooding because of the low elevation of much of its land mass, developed an elaborate system of dikes, dams, floodgates, drains and pumps to maintain land reclaimed from its lakes, marshes and the sea. Development of these polders began way back in the 16th century.
Amsterdam’s Schiphol International Airport, one of the world’s best, is built on a polder, developed from a lake that was drained way back in the 19th century.
In Italy, the structures in Venice have not collapsed. Their timber foundations, driven straight down through soft mud and embedded deep into the clay seabed, have survived for centuries.
There are engineering interventions to ensure the sturdiness of structures built on areas that are submerged in or frequently exposed to water. Oil rigs, bridges and tunnels have been built in the sea.
So it’s dismaying that we can’t build a decent flood control structure that can actually serve its purpose. Instead we keep seeing flood control projects collapsing in the first heavy rainfall.
In just a week, two such structures – both newly built – have collapsed, in Bulacan and Tarlac.
Local officials cite high tide and loosened soil as aggravating circumstances in the collapse of both structures.
If flood control projects aren’t built for high tide and soil erosion, we’re doomed.