Series 21: Forever Peace or Forever Wars
Entitled “Poverty of Power”, I published a book in 2022, premised on two monumental problems the Philippines has been trying to solve since the 1970s but has been unsuccessful: high electricity costs and increasing annual flooding.
Felino Palafox gave a long definition of that short title, in his recent interview by Bilyonaryo.com:
“The technical solutions are straightforward. What’s missing is political will. The government has no institutional memory. Projects approved under one administration are canceled by the next. Without continuity, nothing gets done.”
Who is Palafox?
Palafox is a Filipino engineer who took urban planning at Harvard and who said that the effects of Ondoy was “not an act of God but man. A sin of omission by government and private real estate developers.”
Hurricane Ketsana hit the Philippines as “Ondoy” in September 2009. It was not even a super typhoon; it made landfall as a tropical storm.
But it dropped 4,600 cubic meters of water per second from mountains east of Luzon, careening down the Marikina River onto the Pasig River which only has the capacity of 600 cubic meters.
The rainwaters emptied at the intended natural impounding system, the Laguna Lake that overflowed, flooding 90,000 hectares of urban land in MegaManila – an area bigger than the entire Singapore.
The urban planner exposed that on 1977, the World Bank sponsored a study called “Metro Manila Transport, Land Use and Urban Development Planning Project” noting the possibility of heavy flooding in at least three sites of urban growth in the Philippine capital – the Marikina Valley, and its northern and southern parts, the very same areas ravaged by the recent flood.
The flood control master plan mapped the massive volume rainwater coming from the Sierra Madre ranges at the east, rushing to start the Marikina River at Montalban (now Rodriguez town) through a system of floodgates and weirs onto the Manggahan Floodway at Pasig City and finally all the way to the Laguna Lake as catch basin.
Palafox emphasized, however, specifically the urgency to construct a spillway under Sucat Road in Paranaque (the closes distance between east and west) to drain excess water from Laguna Lake to Manila Bay in case of an overflow.
President Corazon Aquino mothballed the project.
“Without this (exhaust system), stormwaters will routinely overwhelm drainage systems, as Laguna Lake is like toilet without a flush.”
So the inevitable has come: “Our drainage system was designed for 25-year floods. But 100-year storms now happen almost every other year.
“Climate change is just an excuse for Metro Manila floods. For the past 50 years, there have been so many plans to address hazards before they become disasters.”
So, after Ondoy Palafox gave a 10-year program with 60 recommendations to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, but laments: “Most still haven’t been implemented.”
He mentioned that Singapore built massive flood infrastructures despite heavier rainfall. Kuala Lumpur completed a “smart tunnel” that doubles as a tollway and spillway in six years. “If we started in 2009, ours could have been done by 2015.”
Adaptive architecture
In a recent aerial inspection of flood ravaged areas north of Manila, Public Works Secretary Vince Dizon presented to President Marcos a plan to construct a dam on the mouth of Pampanga and Bulacan fronting the Manila Bay.
It was, however, only a coastal highway requiring a lot of reclamation protruding into Manila Bay.
Dizon just plucked this coastal highway project from the DPWH archives to arrive at a quickie to impress Marcos. It has no flood-control footnotes and relevance.
In fact, based on new technologies, this new reclamation proposal further endangers to suffocate the deltaic nature of the floodplains already being strangled by a manmade disaster caused by a humungous land fill to construct the platform for an airport project of oligarch Ramon Ang and his San Miguel Corporation infrastructure division.
Engineering alone is insufficient, Palafox said. urging adaptive architecture.
For centuries, Netherlands relied on building higher and stronger embankments and dikes to keep water out entirely.
Recognizing climate change, rising sea levels, and higher river discharges, the Dutch moved in the 1990’s toward accommodating water rather than just blocking it.
Instead of narrowing and trapping rivers between higher dikes and man-made concretes , this initiative redesigned the inlands and relocated entire villages, lowered floodplains, dug side channels, and created emergency retention areas to safely hold excess water during peak flows and release the load at ebb tide.
Instead of fighting nature, the Dutch befriended it.
Delta Works: Room for the River
So flood control, Palafox argued, cannot be addressed in isolation. “There are about 20 kinds of infrastructure and 13 modes of urban transport. In the Philippines, we have less than 10 of each,” he said.
He has long called for ridge-to-reef planning, or coordinated development from upland forests to coastal zones, scientific solutions based on facts on the grounds, espoused by the founders of the Bulacan Coast Watch since 2018.
Flood-control plunder
At the time I was editing my book, I was hoping that the incoming presidency of Ferdinand Marcos’s junior would continue the yet unfinished vision of his father for a flood-free MegaManila and enforce best practices in water management, taking us out of a cyclical rut.
Maybe, I said, he could convert the poverty of power onto the power of poverty – a government enabling a good turn for its poor people, a “phoenix” we have been waiting for 500 years since the Spaniards choked us as a colony (1521 to 2021).
Four years into his term, Bongbong Marcos has not only been weighed and found lacking in competence to face such challenge, but to my shock, served as the “mastermind” of more than a trillion pesos in plunderous insertions in the 2023 to 2025 public works projects, that is, if we are to believe his cousin, the former Speaker Martin Romualdez.
The former Speaker premised his indictment by asserting that legislative accomplishments of the House of Representatives relied heavily on a deliberate and essential collaboration with the executive branch.
He pointed out that national spending plans originate from the executive branch’s National Expenditure Program before undergoing congressional review.
Moreover, amid public scrutiny over infrastructure and funding allocations, Romualdez maintained that project execution and fund disbursement fall under the direct purview of executive agencies rather than lawmakers.
The game board
In his Manila Times column entitled “Worst flooding under the worst presidency”, Ambassador Rigoberto Tiglao, said that as a consequence, “there is no need to manufacture an image of national collapse. Filipinos can see it on their (smart) phones.”
For weeks, he said, social media has been inundated with heart-wrenching photos of how the floods have made Filipinos’ lives so miserable; a visual indictment of a state that has spent hundreds of billions of pesos supposedly to prevent precisely its occurrence.
By the government’s own count, the scale is staggering:
As of August 30, more than 8.1 million Filipinos in 10 regions had been affected across several weather disturbances. But as a measure of how many Filipinos’ lives have been upended, it shows how extraordinary the present flooding has become.
Tiglao minces no words: These scenes would be tragic under any administration. But 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.
Tiglao accurately observed that 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.”
Mastermind who?
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.
The former ambassador pointed out that not 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) in a country where floods kill, every ghost dike, undersized revetment, falsified accomplishment report and kickback is not merely theft from the Treasury. That is precisely why stealing from flood control programs is such a monstrous crime.
“Marcos would like the country to believe that he is the outsider who discovered the racket. But politics is judged by results, and the result visible to millions is water inside their homes,” Tiglao said.
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 Manila Times columnist emphasizes that his phrase “worst presidency” is a political judgment, not a statistical category. But presidencies are judged by what ordinary people experience.
Today, he concludes: “tens of millions have 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 doesn’t have the will, the institutional memory 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.”
Kilos Bulacan
But the problems of Bulacan and Pampanga are not just graft and plunder by public officials involving flood control projects.
Private sector greed and corruption have also exacerbated flood risks.
Hundreds of residents, farmers and fisherfolk waded through flooded roads in Bulacan last August 31, to protest corruption in flood-control projects and reclamation developments that they blame for worsening the province’s chronic flooding.
The National Heroes Day protest was led by the anti-corruption alliance Kilos Bulacan, representing 34 people’s organizations and movements.
The rallyists assembled at the Malolos Digital Amphitheatre, walked a kilometer to the Bulacan Capitol grounds where they held a program demanding the imprisonment of national and Bulacan officials involved in the flood-control scandal, and the return of funds they allegedly obtained through corruption.
When Christian Natividad, mayor of Malolos City was asked his comment on Kilos Bulacan, he said:
“It is harder to be a public servant today because the people have raised their standards. Almost everyone is anti-government.
“We cannot blame the people because they have witnessed the scandals never been seen before. The gravity is complicated by that fact that the perpetrators have high positions in public service.
“We need to be able to listen to the problems, to the needs of the people, to criticisms of shortcomings they say we have. We should always be open to those things.”
Bulacan has recently remained heavily flooded after successive tropical cyclones and days of southwest monsoon or habagat thunderstorms.
Bulakenyos no longr wonder why their province has been under a state of calamity, year after year.
But what was significantly roasted was the Bulacan Airport aka New Manila International Airport (NMIA) development in Bulakan town, which involved a 2,500-hectare reclamation along the Manila Bay coast.
The Pamalakaya group claimed the project has uprooted nearly 1,000 fishing families in Barangay Taliptip and resulted in the removal of more than 600 mangrove trees.
The airport project has experienced consistent criticism since it was first made public in 2019; but San Miguel Corporation (SMC) chairman and CEO Ramon S. Ang dismissed them as baseless rumors or tsismis.
Ang instead blamed heavy rainfall, overflowing river systems, and water releases from dams like Bustos and Ipo as the primary drivers of downstream flooding.
Ka Tunying interview: godly assurances three years ago!
2026 Press Conference: No longer God!
Archie San Miguel, one of the organizers of Kilos Bulacan, said nobody is accusing the airport of causing the flood but it has definitely aggravated it to levels “far worse”.
The NMIA has dumped 2,500 hectares of landfill at the coastal end of a delta, designed by Mother Nature to comprise a network of creeks and tributary rivers, former fishponds, mudflats, tidal areas, floodplains, wetlands, watershed, mangrove forestation and inter-connected waterways, between down-streaming waters and a semi-enclosed Manila Bay.
If the floodplain is gone, where does the flood go?
San Miguel Corporation also does not want to call it “reclamation”, to avoid legal complications, but “land development”.
Ang rationalizes that the site is not new land reclaimed from the sea, but rather historically dry land that subsided over time into fishponds and was subsequently refilled.
We can grant that “touch of lipstick ” for the sake of argument. But the fact remains – call it by whatever name you like, but it still creates the same effect.
Adding insult to injury, Undersecretary Annaliza Rebuelta Teh, in a reply to my complaint in 2019, even painted the term “horizontal” land development.
That is how powerful lipsticks are, they make our government regulators see, hear or speak no evil!
A lump of horse pucky, really!!
To be continued.
The book “Poverty of Power” has 8 chapters explaining MegaManila flooding and may be ordered by texting 0917-336-4366. The cost P799 includes JRS delivery nationwide.
August 4, 2023
August 12, 2023:
Adolfo Quizon Paglinawan
is former diplomat who served as press attaché and spokesman of the Philippine Embassy in Washington DC and the Philippines’ Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York from April 1986 to 1993. Presently, he is vice-president for internal affairs of the Asian Century Philippines Institute, a geopolitical analyst, author of books, columnist, a print and broadcast journalist, and a hobby-organic-farmer.
His best sellers, A Problem for Every Solution (2015), a characterization of factors affecting Philippine-China relations, and No Vaccine for a Virus called Racism (2020) a survey of international news attempting to tracing its origins, earned for him an international laureate in the Awards for the Promotion of Philippine-China Understanding in 2021. His third book, The Poverty of Power is now available – a historiography of controversial issues of spanning 36 years leading to the Demise of the Edsa Revolution and the Forthcoming Rise of a Philippine Phoenix.
Today he is anchor for many YouTube Channels, namely Ang Maestro Lectures @Katipunan Channel (Saturdays), Unfinished Revolution (Sundays) and Opinyon Online (Wednesdays) with Ka Mentong Laurel, and Ipa-Rush Kay Paras with former Secretary Jacinto Paras (Tuesdays and Thursdays). His personal vlog is @AdoPaglinawan.
This promo includes free delivery by JRS to anywhere in the Philippines.
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