Daven Tamayo

Boardroom Tea: We paid P1.8-T for flood control, so why are we still drowning?

Article (news)

Salve Ibaňez

ABS-CBN News

Possibly one of the most important economic stories in Philippine history has been triggered by how floodwaters have just this week swallowed the San Simon Interchange on NLEX &mdash; the country&rsquo;s main artery to the North.The interchange was choked by water with nowhere left to go and got people furious about this year&rsquo;s toll of habagat: at least thirty-three dead, eight million Filipinos aﬀected, more than eight billion pesos in damage to roads, bridges, houses,livelihoods, and farms. And a nation, including a very frustrated Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David asking the same furious question: where did the flood control money go? Where is the accountability?BetterGov.ph and the People&rsquo;s Budget Coalition are tracking the money, and one figure provided by former DPWH Secretary Babes Singson lashes out: taxpayers have paid P1.8 trillion pesos for flood control projects since 2016. But the science shows, says Kenneth Abante, co-convenor of the coalition, that P800 to P900 billion would have funded all eighteen river basic master plans.<div> </div><div>ME: WE PAID DOUBLE, AND STILL WE DROWN.</div>So I asked Ken, one of the &ldquo;angry nerds&rdquo; to be interviewed on camera, figuratively bringing massive calculators, cracking open the 2027 budget submitted by the Oﬃce of the President to Congress, due for the President&#39;s signature in December.The headline number: P735.56 billion in red flags inside the P7.2-trillion 2027 budget now sitting in both houses of Congress.Hard pork, P483 billion: infrastructure lines submitted by the Executive with no program of works, no price basis, and in several cases no certificate that the host LGU even knew the project was coming.Soft pork, P140 billion: AICS, TUPAD, medical assistance and the like, still running on the guarantee-letter system that turns a citizen&#39;s right into a politician&#39;s favor, which matters a great deal in a budget that will be spent in an election year.Shadow pork, P112 billion: unprogrammed appropriations that ideally should never be released if revenues are less than target.The bad nerds in government have found a way around this: they choose one revenue item and use that as a switch for fund release. Kenneth said this is already being discussed at the Supreme Court. All taxpayers should care, because to fund this, we and our children pay the debt that will finance such items. In short: wala pa yung pera, ginagastos na.And the new mutation, local pork, P59 billion tucked inside the soft category by way of the Local Government Support Fund. Here is the part that should worry any CFO reading this. Of the P7.2 trillion, about 84 percent is already spoken for before a single new classroom is drawn: P1.11 trillion in interest alone on the country&rsquo;s massive debt, more than DepEd&#39;s entire budget for the first time in history; P1.9 trillion in salaries of government oﬃcials whose salaries keep increasing; P1.3 trillion to local governments, a bigger slice of the pie going to richer ones than poor ones; P143 billion for military and uniformed personnel pensions paid completely by taxpayers.Ten years ago, roughly P50 of every P100 in the budget could go to productive spending. Today it is P36. That is not a budget with fiscal space that can grow the economy.To be fair, there is good news. The backdoor line item in unprogrammed appropriations that funded so much of the flood control mess is gone. DPWH Secretary Vince Dizon has committed to making public all the documents for 11,000 projects: program of works, geotagged coordinates, Mayors&#39; certificates.Previously, tracing a project through the budget was near impossible. The document goes through nine versions from the Oﬃce of the President to the signed GAA, each around a thousand pages, and Ken tells me in the past, even the House has trouble getting the Senate&#39;s copy.How can an ordinary citizen call the government out if this is the case?Which brings us to CADENA, the Blockchain the Budget Act. The Senate passed it in December. Bam Aquino has been asking, in increasingly frustrated tones and rightly so, why it has spent the better part of a year in the House and why it was dropped from LEDAC&#39;s shortlist of priority measures.Media, along with the angry nerds, have a big job to do. But wait, why not everybody? We are the immune system of our economy. Governance is not just about the government. It is about institutions like universities, civil society organizations, the media, among others, as watchdogs of government.Ken&#39;s closing line stayed with me long after the cameras went oﬀ.&quot;Every time it floods,&quot; Ken said, &quot;we will remind them of the corruption that is killingus.&quot;The nerds are angry. On the evidence, they are also right.<div>Catch the full interview with Kenneth Abante on The Boardroom this Friday, September&nbsp;4, 2026.&nbsp;</div>

Possibly one of the most important economic stories in Philippine history has been triggered by how floodwaters have just this week swallowed the San Simon Interchange on NLEX — the country’s main artery to the North.

Possibly one of the most important economic stories in Philippine history has been triggered by how floodwaters have just this week swallowed the San Simon Interchange on NLEX — the country’s main artery to the North.