Marcos must go: A ghost presidency must end

HERE’S the brutal reality: The flood-control scandal involving ghost and defective projects allocated tens of billions of pesos has inarguably demonstrated that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is grossly incompetent to lead this middle-sized nation of 116 million citizens and a state of 4 million employees. We have a ghost presidency:

There is no real leader governing the nation in that post, only a phantom that relies on PR stunts and gimmickry, appearing occasionally before us from nowhere.

Represented by the pea-brained cartoonist in this paper, who portrayed Marcos as boldly going against the corrupt, we have a mercenary mainstream media refusing to see this elephant in the room. It is President Marcos himself who, either out of laziness, an innate disinterest in governance, ignorance on how to manage organizations, and perhaps a kleptocratic DNA, who wouldn’t and couldn’t stop corruption on a massive scale in his so far three years of rule.

Now that the massive corruption has come to light, he thinks Filipinos are so stupid that he can fool them to think that he is the one undertaking a campaign against it. If Marcos had no idea that budget allocations for flood control from 2022 to mid-2025 were being siphoned off to the pockets of corrupt contractors, officials of the public works department, and members of the House of Representatives, then his is an incompetent presidency. If he did know about it and profited from it, then his is a kleptocratic presidency.

The ghost flood-control scandal is the largest infrastructure racket in our history that has come to light, dwarfing the P10-billion pork barrel scam of a decade ago. But it is just the tip of the iceberg of infrastructure corruption. The public works department’s budget for flood control totaled P556 billion from 2022 to 2024, just 22 percent of its total infrastructure budget of P2.6 trillion for these three years.

Corruption

In fact, most of us haven’t even heard of ghost flood-control projects before as venues for corruption, but instead have heard of the corruption in the building of roads, bridges, and even small municipal-level projects.

A year ago, I was approached by an old friend asking me if I could talk to a high-profile Laguna representative to lower the P5 million “commission” he was asking for a contract to build a P10 million “multi-purpose” building. Another friend, on the other hand, was asking for my help to get back a P25 million “SOP” that a high-ranking department official, handpicked by Marcos from the private sector, had asked from him to sign off on a bridge project. The official either resigned or was fired, failing to sign the contract, but has refused to return the P25 million.

The ghost flood-control projects and substandard works across the breadth of the country are not isolated mistakes; they are the clearest sign yet that the president is either dangerously incompetent — or hopelessly complicit. From Bulacan and Pampanga to Cavite and Metro Manila, the scenes are depressingly familiar: homes underwater, schools shut down, farmers losing crops, and small businesses shuttered.

And where had the president been? Taking selfies at relief operations, grinning for the cameras as if photo ops could stop a flood, before hopping onto another plane for another foreign trip. It is surreal that Marcos even visits sites where a flood-control project should have been, or was so substandard they were easily overwhelmed and gave way to floods, and says he is “very angry.” Doesn’t he realize he should be angry at himself?

Romualdez

This corruption has been going on since he assumed power for three years, and only now is he launching a campaign to stop it? Only the likes of his PR man-cum-ambassador-to the US Jose Romualdez believes that, and worse, disseminates such a canard in a newspaper.

Didn’t it cross Marcos’ mind that he hadn’t properly supervised the DPWH, which everyone knows has, since our nation’s independence, been the favorite nest of corruptors? It’s a puzzle why the DPWH secretary he appointed since he assumed power, Manuel Bonoan, hasn’t been fired, or even just suspended. Has Bonoan intimated that he will spill the beans if he is fired?

Didn’t anybody in his inner circle — his executive secretary, his advisers, his special assistants, and even his wife, who has her own network — tell him: “Boss, grabe na kurakutan sa DPWH.” Indeed, I’ve been hearing from different contractors:” Before BBM, the ‘SOP’ was 15 percent and even 20 percent. Under this government, it’s been 40 percent.”

Marcos didn’t uncover these ghost flood-control projects. A series of events forced him to pretend to undertake a campaign to clamp down on the corrupt involved in such scams to cover up for utter failure in curbing such graft in the past three years.

Marcos, in his July 2024 State of the Nation Address (SONA), claimed that his administration has completed more than 5,500 flood control projects. He pledged P500 billion over the next decade to protect Metro Manila and Central Luzon.

Carina

Days later, Typhoon Carina and the monsoon flooded those areas and others, clearly belying his boasts. His critics started to focus on exposing the immense gap of Marcos’ claimed flood-control projects and the reality of floods all over the metropolis and certain provinces.

To put up a pretense that he is doing something to clamp down on corruption, he created a website to allow citizens to report defective or ghost flood-control projects.

Some over-eager DPWH official dumped too much data on the website. The portal listed nearly 9,855 flood-control projects implemented from July 2022 to May 2025, along with contractors’ corporate names, costs and statuses — except the owners of these firms. The red flags screamed: 640 projects had unclear descriptions, and P100 billion (18 percent) of the P545 billion program was awarded to just 15 contractors.

Marcos also didn’t expect that the May elections would put to the 20th Senate two senators, unafraid of the administration, “unbribable,” who have proven excellent investigative skills: a seasoned litigator Rodante Marcoleta and the veteran senator and ex-policeman Panfilo Lacson. Nearly all in the past Senate either didn’t have the skills or the interest in uncovering corruption, the moral standing to do so since they were charged for involvement in the pork-barrel scam, or wouldn’t, like Sen. Risa Hontiveros, touch anything that would remotely hurt the image of the Marcos administration.

Worse for Marcos, Marcoleta was chosen by his colleagues to head the Senate’s blue ribbon committee that is authorized to investigate reports of corruption. Marcoleta, on his first day in the Senate, immediately launched “Philippines Under Water” — targeting ghost projects, contractor monopolies and potential graft.

Shadowy

Shadowy practices were fast exposed, such as license renting and projects awarded out of sync with actual flood-prone needs. In a fiery privilege speech on Aug. 20, Senator Lacson declared that half of the P2 trillion historically allocated for flood control over 15 years may have been lost to corruption, with only 30 to 40 percent of funds reaching tangible projects.

In short, the investigations into ghost or defective flood-control projects have gained momentum, way beyond Marcos’ intention of putting up a show that he is clamping down on corruption under his government.

Marcos tried to tiptoe away from the scandal by asking “investigative journalists” to find out who owns the contracting firms and anomalies they have knowledge about. But he has the entire state machinery at his disposal: the Securities and Exchange Commission to produce ownership records, the Commission on Audit to submit the audits of public works department audit contracts, why even the so-called quadcom of the House of Representatives under the command of his cousin, House Speaker Martin Romualdez.

The National Bureau of Investigation has had, for many decades, a corps of skilled investigators to unearth scams. But the NBI has been chasing rabbits, focusing on running after bloggers critical of the regime, hunting down makers of viral videos showing Marcos sniffing cocaine, and pretending to be counter-espionage experts going after alleged Chinese spies — all of which ended up facing blank walls. The Philippines National Police’s Criminal Investigation and Detection Group has the personnel and institutional expertise to track down sophisticated crimes. But Marcos ordered its head to focus on such projects as how to kidnap former president Rodrigo Duterte and bring him to the International Criminal Court’s jail.

The ghost flood-control scandal dwarfs the notorious PDAF, pork-barrel scandal of the early 2000s in both scale and concentration. It involved P10 billion in misused public funds funneled through bogus NGOs. In contrast, just 15 flood-control contractors got P71 billion in funds from July 2022 to May 2025, many of which were for non-existent or substandard structures.

Under the Constitution, a president can be removed for betrayal of public trust. Allowing or just being unaware of a system where billions vanish into ghost projects is betrayal of the public trust. If Marcos has a shred of integrity, he should resign. If he refuses, Congress must do its duty and remove him through impeachment.

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Marcos must go: A ghost presidency must end
Source: Breaking News PH