When we can simply let water run its course, it is absurd to allot large sums for a government office to direct its flow.
Of course, the unchecked and unplanned growth of many Philippine communities justifies the existence as well as indicts the Department of Public Works and Highways. We realize that some of the most crucial strategies for protecting our settlements from inundation such as clearing creeks and estuaries need resources that only a national government agency like the department can harness. A neighborhood unaided has no power to build structures to shield itself from a deluge.
Still, the coming days will see more protests than ever aimed at compelling officialdom to guarantee credibility in probing public-private corruption — with the department at the center — in the guise of flood resilience efforts. I for one am looking to join a nonviolent demonstration in Cebu to send our officials a loud and clear signal that we long ago lost all patience for crookedness in the establishment.
Many Filipinos, including Philippine Judicial Academy lecturer Fr. Ranhilio Callangan Aquino and former Supreme Court chief justice Maria Lourdes Sereno have been saying that members of Congress have lost the public perception of credibility so necessary to bringing the investigations to a satisfying end.
“Since congressmen and senators are angling to outdo each other in casting aspersions if not outright accusations at each other, these ongoing inquiries in the legislative committees now suffer from a serious deficit of credibility,” Aquino wrote Sept. 10, 2025, on Facebook.
Sereno, for her part, wrote: “It truly would be impossible to vanquish corruption… if the fight would be led by those who are corrupt. They are the ones who normalize corruption, are they not?”
Aquino urged the Marcos administration to “constitute an independent fact-finding committee of persons not connected with [the] government, with no relations to antagonists and protagonists, who know of which they speak, where to look and what questions to ask.”
Malacañang has announced the creation of the Independent Commission on Infrastructure to investigate and hold accountable everyone who profited from anomalous deals.
With sustained protest, let us keep up the pressure: on legislators until they penalize their corrupt colleagues and on the commission until commissioners ensure the punishment of thieves and recovery of our wasted money.
We need the public works department and the rest of the government purged of crooks so that they will serve us once more.
Yet while we grind our teeth at the unfolding spectacle of the pilfering, in the trillions, of our money, we must remember that our flooding woes per se have smaller dimensions within which we as individuals and small communities are not quite powerless.
Every grade school student who knows basic science understands that floods are often a consequence of our joint neglect of this planet that is our common home.
We raze forests, clog our drainage systems with garbage, and are slow to stop using plastics and other products that hardly degrade.
We build structures that suffocate our waterways (Exhibit A: Cebu City’s Parian estuary), fail to store rainwater and pave the ground with concrete, thereby preventing the soil from absorbing the rain.
We reforest haphazardly, resist flood warning systems, live in danger zones, and are slow to recalibrate our lifestyles in view of the climate emergency that worsens floods by hitting us with higher tides.
In these ways, our flooding predicament is of our own making; we created the conditions for hoodlums masquerading as our saviors from disaster to come raid our coffers.
Flooding plus opportunism among public works employees, contractors and legislators may be partly solved if we all come together to wrest the perfect cover from the charlatans and robbers, doing what we can to get out of the water’s way. Fewer vulnerable locales, fewer excuses for flood control proposals.
It should not cost billions or trillions for the public works, disaster risk reduction, environment, and civil defense agencies among others, if they must help, to constantly inform and teach through their communication offices individuals and communities to fulfill their roles in flood prevention.
The political philosophical principle of subsidiarity holds that “it is unjust for a higher authority (e.g., the state’s government and law) to usurp the self-governing authority that lower authorities (e.g., in families or other civil associations), acting in the service of their own members (groups and persons), rightly have over those members” (Finnis, 2016).
We must now, as individuals and groups, reclaim the role we once torpidly abdicated in preventing the reduction of our own barangays, towns, and cities into a real-world Atlantis, even as we demand accountability from the highest levels of the government for the flood fund mess.
Let us get to work, and in the words of Carly Simon, let the river run.