Screen grab from: AP
Every monsoon that batters our land does more than unleash rain—it exposes the rot in governance. Floodwaters rise not because nature is cruel, but because billions supposedly spent on flood-control projects were stolen through ghost contracts, fake contractors, and sham infrastructure. Lives, homes, livelihoods, and small businesses are washed away while our taxes vanish into the pockets of the corrupt. This is not just incompetence—it is betrayal.
In Congress, the people find no real defense. A House of Representatives too timid to act, content to play puppets for political survival. As usual its more like a circus or carnaval in town. A Senate eager to parade its “blue ribbon” probes, but too often reduced to spectacle rather than substance, where politics play a great deal of drama that lessens the demand for the truth. And a President who treats accountability as a game of hot potato—passing the blame to predecessors to cover up his own failures. Meanwhile, local governments continue to push billion-peso loans under the banner of “development programs” that taxpayers doubt will ever reach them.
Adding insult to injury, the very officials entrusted with power—paid with the people’s taxes, enjoying handsome salaries, perks, and privileges—prefer the comforts of their air-conditioned offices over the harsh realities outside. While families wade through waist-deep floods, officials sip coffee in climate-controlled boardrooms. While children cling to rooftops waiting for rescue, executives attend ribbon-cuttings and photo ops.
This is not mere negligence. This is criminal dereliction of duty—a betrayal of public trust that costs lives.
Floods may be natural disasters, but the devastation we endure is man-made—born of corruption, cowardice, negligence, and greed. Every wasted peso is a stolen school, a lost hospital, a community robbed of safety and dignity. This is economic sabotage disguised as governance, a slow violence that robs generations of their future.
The Filipino people cannot afford silence any longer. We must reject this circus of excuses. We must demand real transparency. We must hold plunderers and negligent officials—whether in barong or in uniform—accountable under the harshest penalties of law. It is not enough to simply replace them; they must be punished.
True change will never be handed down by the very hands that steal from us. It must be fought for, claimed, and guarded by a vigilant citizenry. For if we remain idle, then we are not just drowning in floods. We are drowning in our own indifference.
