Damn the Floods, Pangandaman Already Cleared It on Paper

By Louis ‘Barok‘ C. Biraogo — August 4, 2025

FILIPINOS are paddling through waist-deep floodwaters in inflatable kiddie pools, while their leaders ride out monsoons in Land Cruisers with engine snorkels—government-issued, of course. In Manila, flood season now doubles as boat season. I met a mother near Araneta Avenue last week who held her toddler in one arm and an empty rice sack in the other.

“Para saan pa ‘yung proyekto nila?” she asked me, while plastic bottles bobbed beside her feet.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that ₱349 billion had already been spent this year on flood control.

This is the theater of the absurd. It’s Cirque du Sobrang Tubig, headlined this monsoon by Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman and her dramatic cry:

“No more imaginary projects!”

Cue the applause. But let’s hold the curtain—because what she’s condemning isn’t fiction. It’s far worse: the real and ruinous kind of incompetence that’s been funded, audited, and immortalized in cement.

Act I: Pangandaman vs. the Phantom Menace (of Her Own Making)

Let’s dissect this. Secretary Pangandaman’s July 2025 speech—her Hamlet moment—where she denounced “ghost projects” as villains draining the nation’s coffers.

Noble? Sure. But who exactly wrote the budget script?

Oh, right. She did.

The Commission on Audit (COA) has already released the spoiler: ₱131 billion in unfinished infrastructure projects. And yet Pangandaman’s Department of Budget and Management (DBM) was the one greenlighting them.

This is the bureaucratic equivalent of a firefighter setting the blaze, then holding a press conference on fire prevention.

According to COA’s 2023 reports, only 450 out of 905 flood mitigation structures were completed. That’s not imaginary—that’s criminal negligence with a cement mixer.

Her rhetoric rests on a false binary: projects are either visible or ghosts. But the real scandal lies in the swampy middle—the zombie projects: half-built, poorly engineered, permanently delayed. They exist just long enough to justify budget insertions and campaign posters, then quietly erode in the next typhoon.

Her agency’s performance metric? Something about “felt impact.”
If that’s the standard, then every drenched commuter in Quezon City should count as a success story.

Act II: Concrete Promises and Collapsed Trust

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., never one to miss a pageant of performative indignation, offered his own soundbite:

“Mahiya naman kayo!”

He wagged his fingers at unnamed officials—as if he hadn’t just vetoed ₱16.7 billion in flood control items his own office approved just months earlier.

Meanwhile, the 2012 World Bank-funded master plan—a $1.2 billion roadmap to flood resilience—sits untouched. Instead, we fund new “feasibility studies.” Why fix floods when you can study them for a fee?

To quote a DPWH insider (anonymity preserved to avoid drowning in paperwork):

“Each ‘study’ is a career’s worth of free meals and per diems.”

COA’s audits read like gothic horror:

The Pasig-Marikina River Channel Improvement Project shows “negative slippage”—a term that translates roughly to “we dug a hole and forgot why.”
Drainage projects from the Aquino era remain “ongoing.”
In Pampanga, ₱170 million was spent on flood walls that collapsed within weeks.

Someone should tell DPWH that “permanent flood control” doesn’t mean permanently constructing it.

Act III: The Cost of Incompetence (and Climate)

Then came Super Typhoon Carina:

₱4.7 billion in damages,
7 million Filipinos affected,
Entire economies drowned in weeks.

For perspective, that’s nearly the entire budget of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD)—a department that had its emergency funds slashed.

Because when you’re underwater, naturally the first thing to cut is life vests.

It’s the poor who pay most dearly: relocated from waterways to nowhere, promised “resilient housing” that now doubles as aquariums. While Pangandaman talks about fiscal discipline, programs like AKAP and MAIP—lifelines for displaced families—are labeled “pork.”

Irony alert:

Flood budgets become pork. Anti-pork rhetoric becomes political pork. It’s the ouroboros of hypocrisy, now with more algae.

One slum-dweller told me during the habagat surge:

“When they say flood control, they mean controlling the funds, not the water.”

He gestured to a concrete wall stamped with a congressman’s face. Behind it, the river had simply rerouted.

Barok’s Corruption Bingo

Let’s play along with the bureaucracy. Here’s your corruption decoder:

Bureaucratic Euphemism	Translation
Idle projects	Embezzlement sabbatical
Negative slippage	We lost the blueprints
Felt impact	Nobody died this week
Budget realignment	The money’s somewhere in Cavite
Consultancy phase	Champagne with a PowerPoint
Unified masterplan	A sequel to the unfinished draft
Audit pending	Pray COA gets distracted

What to Do After the Water Rises and the Lies Settle

Let’s drop the pageantry and do something that actually works:

1. Geotag or GTFO

Build a public, GPS-tagged dashboard of all flood projects with real-time updates, drone photos, and budget tracking. If Waze can track potholes, the government can track flood walls.

2. Prosecute, Don’t Posture

COA already named officials involved in anomalous spending. Freeze their assets. File disallowance cases. Handcuff the contractors who took the cash and poured sand.

3. Nature, Not Just Concrete

The Asian Development Bank offered $500 million in support for nature-based flood protection. Reforest uplands. Reclaim wetlands. And ban concrete on riverbanks unless it’s to jail corrupt engineers.