Marcos shamelessly tries to spin flood-control mega mess

THIS is a textbook case for study if you’re a student — or practitioner — of propaganda. Shameless, though, on the part of President Marcos Jr. and his PR people.

They are onto a huge PR effort — extremely expensive, I was told — to portray Marcos as an anti-corruption crusader going after contractors of ghost and defective flood-control projects. Never mind if these were all undertaken under his administration.

His inner circle is worried that this huge corruption case — rather cases — would be like the disclosure by Chavit Singson in 2000 that President Estrada had received P400 million in jueteng money and proceeds of the tobacco excise tax — which eventually triggered the People Power 2 uprising that deposed him.

Marcos, as the government’s chief executive, is ultimately accountable for this huge crime against the country. About 100 have died because of the leptospirosis resulting from stagnant waters, and billions of pesos in lost incomes. Marcos’ posture of going after the criminal contractors is just like a general letting his soldiers undertake mass murders, and then later feigning innocence of such sordid crimes, and promising an investigation.

Data shows that from the start of his administration to this year, flood-control projects totaled P808 billion, more than double the P372 billion total in the previous four-year period under President Rodrigo Duterte. Data is also trickling in that many of the top flood-control projects are owned by politicians who had joined his Partido Federal ng Pilipinas when Marcos became president.

The party of the now infamous Sarah Discaya — who had boasted about her collection of 40 luxury cars worth at least P250 million and was one of the biggest flood control contractors — had affiliated with Marcos’ Partido Federal. Congressman Elizalde Co, said to be House Speaker Martin Romualdez’s right-hand man in allocating funds to the House of Representatives, is linked to Sun West Construction, although he claims to have divested.

Kennon

The other day, Marcos himself said that the P260 million project intended to prevent the Kennon Road to Baguio from rockfalls was useless, as if the government threw money into the river. The project was undertaken by a firm established by a former congressman, Francis Cuyo, who is also a member of Marcos’ Partido Federal.

Two of his top apologists have given the guidelines for this truth-bending spin in their Philippine Star columns. Jose (“Babe”) Romualdez, a longtime PR adviser, a second cousin of Marcos, and current Philippine ambassador to the US, wrote:

“In his last state of the nation address, Marcos ordered an audit of all flood mitigation projects, and an initial review by the DPWH revealed that of the P545 billion public funds allocated for all flood control projects nationwide in the last three years, P100 billion or almost 20 percent went to only 15 contractors. Of late, the president has been going on a nationwide fact-finding mission to see for himself the extent of corruption in infrastructure projects.”

Romualdez’s colleague in the same paper wrote in the most brown-nosing piece he has ever written: “[His] state of the nation address (SONA) of July 28, 2025, showed President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr.’s mettle to do a major house cleaning in his governance, tackle corruption, deliver basic services and improve meaningfully the life of Filipinos.”

PR

Rather than a president tackling the corruption bull by the horns, these “initiatives” were itself part of the PR project launched after the horrific floods hit Manila and other areas right after he had boasted in his 2024 SONA that his administration had completed “5,500 flood control projects and many more are being constructed all over the country.”

Marcos’ “house cleaning in his governance” is all for show. What he has done after the floods, right after his boast in 2024, is to set up a website, listing the DPWH’s flood control projects and their contractors. The site didn’t even disclose the ownership of the companies, which the DPWH requires contractors to submit, or else they would be falsifying public documents and be banned from ever bidding for contracts again.

It is sickening for Marcos to undertake “photo-ops” in which he himself visits the alleged ghost or defective flood-control projects, and saying in one instance that he is “angry.” No high DPWH or Malacañang official has accompanied him in these visits, who would have to have some sort of notebook or pad to put down the president’s orders. Not even his special assistant, Antonio Lagdameo, nor the Presidential Management Staff head.

Marcos’ PR thrust is to portray in media that he is clamping down on corrupt contractors. But he is not mobilizing the state’s machinery to do so. His strategy is to wait for the issue to die down, with the image left in the masses’ mind that of a president visiting defective flood-control projects and haranguing these.

I will believe that Marcos indeed has the “mettle” to clamp down at least on defective flood control projects if he does the following things:

First of all, it’s so obvious he has to fire Public Works and Highways Secretary Manuel Bonoan: He can’t even suspend him for so obviously mismanaging the department responsible for undertaking the country’s infrastructure projects costing hundreds of billions of pesos.

Is Marcos afraid that if he is fired, Bonoan would disclose things he doesn’t want to be disclosed, like he himself asking the secretary to undertake a particular infrastructure project, or ordering him to award a bidding to a friend or a political ally?

Second, Marcos should mobilize the government’s investigative bodies — the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), for one — to unearth the corruption inside the DPWH, whose officials have the task of making sure that what’s on paper is actually implemented. There should be a game plan that would involve recruiting the necessary personnel to determine exactly what contracts are ghost or defective projects, and file criminal charges against them.

Third, he should order the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) to investigate the tax liabilities of these contractors, which are likely huge, with the BIR filing court cases, which would allow it to ask the Anti-Money Laundering Council to provide it with data on the wealth these contractors have hidden in banks.

And fourth, the obvious: Marcos should organize a task force, institutionalize it through an executive order, that would work full-time to undertake these tasks.

The big problem, of course, is that at this stage of his administration, no one with integrity would want to head such an entity identified with such an incompetent president.

These things would be a lot more doable if he just resigns, and let a new president run the country. It’s become so obvious he can’t hack it.

---

Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao

X: Twitter: @bobitiglao

Archives: www.rigobertotiglao.com

Book orders: www.rigobertotiglao.com/shop

The post Marcos shamelessly tries to spin flood-control mega mess first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.

Marcos shamelessly tries to spin flood-control mega mess
Source: Breaking News PH