The Senate’s latest hearings on anomalous flood control projects are exposing something far deeper than ghost projects, padded contracts, or the shady practice of “licenses for hire.” What is coming into view is an entrenched system where public works—one of the single largest line items in the national budget—is treated not as a vehicle for development but as a vast reservoir of rent-seeking and political patronage. The testimonies of contractors have peeled back the curtain on an ecosystem sustained by cartels of favored builders, district engineers who act as gatekeepers, and politicians who channel funds to projects that exist more on paper than on the ground.
Led by the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee, the probe has zeroed in on the government’s flood control program—an initiative meant to protect lives, livelihoods, and communities, but now revealed as a lucrative feeding ground for corruption. Senators have said that billions of pesos in public funds may have been misused, siphoned off through ghost projects that were never built, substandard works that crumbled under the weight of the most recent floods, and “licenses for hire” that gave unqualified contractors official cover to bid on state contracts. Every session of the inquiry has added new names, details, and documents to a growing record that points to a deliberate scheme: personalities in government and private business colluding to plunder the state under the guise of protecting it.
Among those in the spotlight are district engineers and contractors such as Discaya, Arevalo, Alcantara, and Hernandez, accused by senators and whistleblowers alike of acting as “economic saboteurs.” They are charged not just with siphoning funds but with endangering the public by leaving communities vulnerable to flooding. The hearings have painted a picture of an industry where the reward lies not in building durable levees or drainage systems, but in cutting corners, inflating costs, and splitting commissions. Behind each failed flood barrier is a profit margin, behind every washed-out road a handshake deal. And behind it all, a political apparatus that approves, defends, and benefits from this corruption.
That lawmakers themselves could be implicated should surprise no one. Infrastructure allocations rarely move without the nod of legislators, and flood control projects, like farm-to-market roads or multipurpose halls, have long been treated as a convenient cover for pork-barrel politics. In this sense, the Senate probe is not just about individual contractors or engineers—it is a mirror reflecting back the complicity of an entire system where public money is routinely traded for political loyalty and private gain.
And yet, even as the committee tightens its net, those implicated have sought to deny, deflect, and feign ignorance, pointing fingers at one another to escape responsibility. Their defenses ring hollow, especially at a moment when governments across Asia are facing popular protests demanding accountability “by the fist” rather than through the slow grind of institutions. The Philippine Senate, by contrast, insists on “due process,” but the challenge is whether such hearings can deliver more than headlines and soundbites. Will they expose the machinery of corruption or merely recycle the spectacle of inquiry without consequence?
For what is being uncovered here is not corruption in the conventional sense of isolated bribery or kickbacks. It is something far more structural and pervasive: the very architecture of corruption itself. Flood control projects, like roads and bridges before them, have become the chosen instruments for siphoning off public funds through mechanisms so entrenched they operate as part of the bureaucracy’s standard operating procedure. What is at stake in these hearings is not just the exposure of irregularities, but a reckoning with how infrastructure—supposedly the backbone of national progress—has been captured, weaponized, and hollowed out to serve private networks of power.
The Senate hearings have revealed not only the scale of financial irregularities but also the murky moral terrain in which contractors and engineers operate. Beneath the headlines of ghost projects and padded contracts lies a subtler, more insidious reality: participation in corruption is rarely a matter of simple choice. It unfolds in a climate shaped by fear, coercion, and the grinding logic of survival within a captured bureaucracy. The testimonies of contractors and DPWH insiders do not merely expose fraudulent acts; they reveal how individuals are drawn—sometimes reluctantly, sometimes willingly—into a machinery that rewards compliance and punishes resistance.
Mark Allan Arevalo of Wawao Builders embodies this tension. He painted himself as a reluctant participant, claiming that his firm’s license was “forcibly used” in ghost flood control projects. On the surface, this sounds like a story of victimhood—a small contractor caught in the crossfire of shadowy officials and greedy intermediaries. Yet a closer look reveals a harsher reality: whether Wawao’s license was coerced or not, the company still participated in the scheme, providing a veneer of legitimacy to projects that otherwise might not have existed. Lending a license—even under duress—is not a neutral act; it becomes part of the infrastructure of corruption itself. In effect, Wawao was both a victim and an enabler, caught in a system where the line between survival and complicity is nearly invisible.
Arevalo’s admission that he cooperated “out of fear” underscores the precarious position contractors occupy in the provinces. These are not simply businessmen bidding for public works; they are players trapped in a shadow game, where refusal could mean stalled projects, legal obstacles, or arbitrary interference from DPWH insiders. Compliance, whether voluntary or coerced, ensures that the cycle of corruption continues unabated.
The testimony of DPWH engineer Brice Hernandez further illuminates this climate of fear. Hernandez admitted to accepting sealed boxes of money “as instructed” by his predecessor—an act he framed not as a decision, but as an obligation within a chain of command. Money passes hand to hand, instructions are followed blindly, and responsibility is diffused—yet the effect is the same: projects are manipulated to funnel benefits to insiders while public resources vanish. Fear is the cement, but complicity is the brickwork, and together they hold up a crooked structure that leaves communities vulnerable to floods, delays, and failed infrastructure.
It would be naïve to view the flood control hearings as purely a moral reckoning. In the tangled theater of Philippine politics, testimonies like those of the Discayas are rarely straightforward; they are almost always weaponized. Not surprisingly, certain factions are already seizing this opportunity to “come clean,” or at least to posture as paragons of truth and reform, while quietly deflecting attention from their own complicity. The irony is palpable: many of the officials implicated, and even those accused of collecting commissions, are veterans of the Marcos-Duterte tandem. Yet partisan forces and self-styled “truth-seeking” vloggers are racing to portray the scandal as a problem exclusive to the current administration, airbrushing out the long lineage of corruption that preceded it.
Meanwhile, the Duterte years—particularly the much-hyped Build, Build, Build program—are hardly spared. The Discayas’ testimony underscores how contractors became major beneficiaries of systemic overpricing, padded contracts, and manipulated bidding processes. Their revenues skyrocketed from ₱99 million in 2016 to ₱20 billion in 2022, a staggering leap that tells its own story. Far from being the heroic saga of “nation-building” promoted in glossy brochures, the infrastructure boom was also a boom in profit extraction, siphoning off billions from projects that were supposed to safeguard communities. The uncomfortable truth is that this pattern is not confined to one regime. It is a cycle that recurs across multiple administrations, whether under Duterte, Marcos, or their predecessors.
What the flood control hearings reveal, then, is a dual reality. On one hand, there is the morality play: politicians, pundits, and influencers selectively highlight misconduct to score political points, using the scandal as ammunition in ongoing power struggles. On the other hand, there is the deeper systemic corruption baked into the machinery of governance itself, where contractors like the Discayas thrive and public officials ensure the game continues. The spectacle may be irresistible for those seeking headlines, but it risks obscuring the hard truth: Philippine infrastructure is ensnared in a cycle of fear, coercion, overpricing, and opportunism that transcends any single administration or party.
This is not just about ghost projects, commissions, or high-profile denials. It is about the structural reality of how infrastructure has been captured. When fear, patronage, and political expediency dominate, public works become both a tool of service and a conduit for private enrichment—and the public pays the price, not just in wasted pesos but in diminished safety and shattered trust. Flood barriers collapse under the first heavy rain, roads are dug up and repaved with suspicious regularity, bridges are built to nowhere. These outcomes are not the result of mere incompetence, as some officials would have us believe. They are the deliberate by-products of corruption: projects designed not to serve but to feed a syndicate.
If the Senate is serious, the investigation cannot stop at naming names or generating soundbites. The trail of evidence—financial statements, bidding records, contractor licenses—must be followed until it produces cases that can withstand scrutiny in court. Otherwise, the hearings will be remembered as yet another addition to the long Philippine tradition of exposés without convictions, scandals without accountability.
Flood control is supposed to protect communities from drowning. Instead, it has become the very means by which Filipinos are made to drown in corruption. The choice before the nation is stark: either dismantle the infrastructure of graft, or accept that every peso poured into rivers, canals, and levees will keep flowing back into the pockets of the powerful.