Ghost Dikes, Real Corpses: How Congress Turned Flood Control into a Funeral Business

Boying Remulla Finally Picks the Fruit He Helped Plant for Fifteen Years

By Louis ‘Barok‘ Biraogo — November 29, 2025

i will not begin with the sterile words “plunder” or “graft.”

I begin with a nine-year-old girl named Angel, perched on the remnants of her roof in Marikina, cradling the body of her grandmother who floated in putrid water for six hours.

She did not die because of the typhoon.

She died because the P26-billion “flood control project” in her barangay was a ghost dike — an imaginary wall that cost P800 million per kilometer and delivered nothing but a ribbon-cutting photo of a smiling congressman who now cannot leave the country.

That is the true face of corruption: corpses rinsed with public money.

And now, at long last, one man has said “Enough.”

The Shaking of the Tree

Ombudsman Jesus Crispin “Boying” Remulla — former congressman, former friend to many of those he now hunts — has declared war on the orchard of corruption.

At least 10 % of the House of Representatives (32 lawmakers out of 318) are under active investigation.
Eight have already been recommended for plunder and graft.
Another 12–15 are next — what Remulla himself called “low-hanging fruit.”
Seventy-seven individuals, including sitting legislators, are grounded by Foreign Travel Restriction Orders.

The nation exhaled — not in relief, but in grim recognition.

We have seen this movie before. We know how it usually ends.

**Pick the fruit, pocket the corpse: democracy’s buy-one-take-one sale.**

I. How the Orchard Actually Works

(A short, brutal anatomy of the theft)

The Seed
A lawmaker inserts a flood-control line item into the budget — often in a district he does not even represent.
The Soil
A terrified or complicit DPWH engineer inflates the program of works.
The Fertilizer
A contractor owned by the lawmaker’s spouse, sibling, cousin, driver, or mistress “wins” the rigged bidding — sometimes incorporated the day after the budget is passed.
The Harvest
Progress billings are paid for concrete never poured, riprap that exists only in Photoshop, pump stations that are empty sheds with shiny nameplates. Cash is withdrawn, placed in fruit boxes, and delivered.
The Pruning
COA issues mild “observations” settled with envelopes and plane tickets. The project is declared “substantially completed” on paper while the river laughs.

Every submerged barangay is a monument to this dance. Every monument has a politician’s name engraved on it.

II. The Remulla Conundrum

Hero, villain, or useful fool?

Give the man his due:

In a country where ombudsmen usually collect pensions instead of evidence, Remulla has moved with terrifying speed. Travel bans in days, not decades. Criminal referrals accepted without the usual constipation. A former lawmaker willing to torch every bridge he once crossed. He says it hurts — friendships lost, children catching shrapnel. Good. If it does not hurt, it is not real.

Now the cold water.

Remulla is a Cavite dunast who sat in that same House for fifteen years and watched the orchard grow. His brother runs the DILG. His appointment came from Malacañang. Some dynasties are suddenly dripping wet while others — equally soaked in flood-control money — remain mysteriously dry.

So we ask, quietly but aloud:

Why do certain names keep falling while others, equally rotten, stay on the branch?
When the Speaker himself reportedly called to proclaim innocence, did Remulla bow or bite?
If this is truly systemic, where are the senators? Where are the former presidents whose real-estate empires rose alongside the very dikes that collapsed?

Remulla is playing the highest-stakes poker in Philippine history. The table is full of marked cards, and the house always wins — unless someone is willing to burn the casino down.

III. Three Possible Endings

The Watershed
Convictions. Fallen dynasties. Procurement laws rewritten with citizen oversight baked in. Impunity finally gets an expiration date.
The Whitewash
Cases crawl for fifteen years. Witnesses vanish. Judges receive midnight visits. The orchard simply replants with new varieties.
The Counter-Revolution
The House retaliates — budget strangulation, impeachment articles, midnight laws to castrate the Ombudsman. We learn again that the powerful do not surrender power; it must be torn from their manicured hands.

The next six months will write the final act.

IV. What Must Be Done

(No more half-measures, no more low-hanging fruit)

Strip the Ombudsman of political appointment. Seven-year term chosen by a council that includes the Chief Justice, CSC chair, and three citizens of proven probity.
Real-time, geotagged, searchable public procurement portal — every document open to any high-school student with a smartphone.
Absolute ban on public officials and relatives up to the fourth degree owning or benefiting from government contractors. No exceptions, no waivers.
Independent Flood Infrastructure Audit Corps — engineers and scientists, not politicians — with power to halt disbursement at the first whiff of rot.
A Freedom of Information law with criminal penalties for concealment.

Anything less is theater.

V. The Choice

This is no longer about Remulla.

It is no longer even about the thirty-two (or fifty, or a hundred) lawmakers who may soon trade barong for orange jumpsuits.

It is about whether the Republic remains a place where children die so congressmen can buy another condo in Rockwell, another bullet-proof SUV, another graduation trip to Disneyland.

Angel and her grandmother are watching from wherever the water took them.

So are we.

The orchard is burning.

Will we fan the flames until only ash and the possibility of clean soil remain — or will we rush in with buckets of denial and let the poisoned trees grow again?

Choose.

The water is already rising.