Worst flooding under the worst presidency
THERE is no need to manufacture an image of national collapse. Filipinos can see it on their phones. For weeks, social media has been inundated with heart-wrenching photos of how the floods have made Filipinos’ lives so miserable: mothers carrying children through brown floodwater, old people ferried out of homes, commuters wading along roads turned rivers, families lifting appliances above the waterline. These are not scenes of another bad monsoon.
They are a visual indictment of a state that has spent hundreds of billions of pesos supposedly to prevent precisely this.
By the government’s own count, the scale is staggering. As of Aug. 30, more than 8.1 million Filipinos in 10 regions had been affected by the combined southwest monsoon and tropical cyclones Luis, Maymay and Neneng. At least 32 people had died, 19 injured and three are still missing. About 25,800 people remained in 297 evacuation centers. Infrastructure damage had reached P6.11 billion and agricultural losses P2.32 billion. Roughly 2,900 houses had been damaged, 349 of them destroyed. This is a national calamity stretching across Luzon and beyond.
The affected-person count is especially revealing. The combined habagat-Carina-Butchoy disaster of 2024 eventually affected roughly 5.4 million people by NDRRMC’s final tally. Typhoon Ulysses in 2020 affected 3.7 million in one mid-storm NDRRMC count, though its own final tally reached nearly 4.9 million. The present 8.1 million figure is cumulative across several weather disturbances and should not be passed off as a meteorological record comparable to a single typhoon. But as a measure of how many Filipinos’ lives have been upended, it shows how extraordinary the present flooding has become.
Pampanga alone gives a picture of the scale. When Marcos visited the province on Aug. 24, provincial figures showed 253 barangay (villages) in 16 local governments flooded, affecting 314,945 families, or 1,009,257 people. More than 11,000 were in evacuation centers and another 11,000 had sought shelter elsewhere. Bulacan, Pampanga and other low-lying areas of Central Luzon were repeatedly inundated as rivers rose and dams released water. In Metro Manila, major roads in Parañaque, Las Piñas, Quezon City, Caloocan, Pasay, Valenzuela, Malabon, Marikina and Mandaluyong flooded. On Aug. 19 alone, more than 9,000 public schools suspended face-to-face classes.
These scenes would be tragic under any administration. Under Ferdinand Marcos Jr., they are politically explosive because flooding has become inseparable from the biggest corruption scandal of his term. Marcos himself disclosed in August 2025 that from July 2022 to May 2025 the government had funded 9,855 flood control projects worth P545 billion. About P100 billion, roughly one-fifth, went to only 15 contractors. More than 6,000 projects worth over P350 billion did not even specify whether the work involved construction, rehabilitation or repair. Marcos called the patterns “disturbing.” He was right. What is astonishing is that such a system could operate on that scale under his own presidency before Malacañang professed shock at discovering it.
The scandal quickly ceased to be an argument about sloppy paperwork. Commission on Audit fraud examinations found Bulacan projects allegedly nonexistent, relocated, mismatched with their approved sites or otherwise riddled with irregularities. One COA batch flagged P309 million in four projects; another reported P344 million in four more as ghost or mismatched. In 2026, the Justice department said the government had recovered P841 million connected with anomalous flood control projects. Contractors and public works officials have been charged, and several suspects arrested. Former Public Works secretary Manuel Bonoan and Sen. Jinggoy Estrada were among those later ordered arrested in a separate P573-million plunder and graft case; both are entitled to the presumption of innocence while their cases are pending.
Fake
The point is not that every flood control project is fake, nor that every flooding can be prevented. The Philippines lies in the path of tropical cyclones, and flooding in Bulacan and Pampanga is also shaped by river basins, tides, dam releases, land subsidence and decades of bad land-use planning. But that is precisely why stealing from flood control programs is such a monstrous crime. In a country where floods kill, every ghost dike, undersized revetment, falsified accomplishment report and kickback is not merely theft from the Treasury. It is theft from public safety.
Marcos would like the country to believe that he is the outsider who discovered the racket. In his 2025 State of the Nation Address he thundered, “Mahiya naman kayo,” at the officials and contractors behind anomalous projects. He ordered investigations, created channels for public complaints, removed locally funded flood control projects from the 2026 budget proposal, and his administration has pursued cases. He has also inspected flooded Bulacan and Pampanga by air and ordered agencies to speed relief. It would be inaccurate to say he has done nothing.
But politics is judged by results, and the result visible to millions is water inside their homes. After four years in office, the public is entitled to ask why the president needed catastrophic floods to discover that hundreds of billions in projects under his own Department of Public Works and Highways were vulnerable to fraud. Who approved the budgets? Who released the money? Who certified the projects as completed? Who protected contractors working across multiple regions? Why did the system survive until public anger made it impossible to ignore?
The administration’s defense is that the corruption predates Marcos, and that the Discaya-linked contracting empire did not begin in 2022. That is true and should be acknowledged. But it is beside the point. A president inherits the state, including its corrupt networks, and becomes responsible for what those networks do on his watch. Marcos cannot claim credit for infrastructure inherited from his predecessors while disowning responsibility for a flood control bureaucracy that spent P545 billion during the first three years of his own government.
This is why the flooding is devastating to the Marcos presidency in a way an ordinary disaster would not be. Every video of a mother carrying a child through chest-deep water evokes the billions supposedly spent on dikes, pumping stations and river walls. Every submerged highway asks where the money went. The floodwaters have become the most powerful auditor in the country, exposing without subpoenas whether infrastructure actually works.
Obscene
And the contrast is obscene. While poor families rescue refrigerators and sacks of rice from filthy waters, the scandal has revealed a world of contractors, political connections and officials accused of treating infrastructure appropriations as private treasure. Government can recover P841 million and prosecute a few accused persons, but that is tiny beside the P545 billion spent in just the first three years. The crucial question is not merely how much stolen money can be recovered. It is how much of the infrastructure Filipinos paid for was never built properly in the first place.
Marcos doesn’t have the will nor the competence to undertake a flood control crackdown. That would require a complete project-by-project audit, blacklisting and prosecution where evidence warrants it, recovery of illicit assets, identification of officials who protected anomalous contractors, and replacement of pork-barrel-style flood works with basin-wide engineering plans that can be measured against outcomes. Above all, it requires speed. Another rainy season cannot be answered by another investigation into why last year’s projects failed.
The saying “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” has been haunting this unlucky country. The massive corruption of Marcos Jr.’s administration is echoing that during his father’s rule. Disastrous floods in 1970 due to two typhoons (Meding and Yoling), and Marcos Sr.’s incompetent response triggered so much outrage against him. This time, Filipinos see a direct link between the flood control corruption under Marcos,Jr.’s term and the widespread floods.
The phrase “worst presidency” is a political judgment, not a statistical category. But presidencies are judged by what ordinary people experience. Today millions experience a government that says it spent unprecedented sums to control floods while their communities remain submerged, and a president who says he is furious at a system that flourished under his own administration. Marcos may insist he is fighting the culprits. For the woman carrying her child through dirty floodwaters, the distinction between corruption inherited and corruption tolerated is academic. She is still in the water.
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
X: @bobitiglao
Website: www.rigobertotiglao.com
The post Worst flooding under the worst presidency first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.
Worst flooding under the worst presidency
Source: Breaking News PH
No comments: