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Magalong Cried Corruption—Ridon Checked the Calendar. Guess Who Won?”

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Louis ‘Barok’ Biraogo

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Magalong Cried Corruption—Ridon Checked the Calendar. Guess Who Won?”
The Pork Barrel Didn’t Die. It Just Learned to Hide Before the NEP Arrives.

By Louis “Barok” C. Biraogo — August 11, 2026

THE theater of Philippine corruption has perfected a singular art form: committing the crime while technically being somewhere else when the body drops. The Magalong-Ridon exchange is not a dispute about facts. It is a masterclass in this jurisprudence of convenient blindness—a duel between a man who sees the smoke and a man demanding you name the arsonist before the match is even lit.

The Procedural Alibi

Let us begin with the procedural alibi, because it is exquisite.

Bicol Saro Party-list Rep. Terry Ridon, a House impeachment prosecutor against Vice President Sara Duterte, declares Baguio Mayor Benjamin Magalong a liar. His reasoning is a clock: the 2027 National Expenditure Program (NEP) had not been transmitted to Congress when Magalong spoke. No NEP, no deliberations, no insertions. Case closed. The calendar, that most objective of arbitrators, has spoken.

He is technically correct. And this is precisely the problem.

“Show Us the Receipts, Not the Script — The Theater of Philippine Corruption”

Belgica’s Incomplete Exorcism

The Supreme Court’s landmark Belgica v. Ochoa decision in 2013 did not kill the pork barrel system. It merely performed an exorcism that forced the demon to find a new host. The Court declared unconstitutional any legislator’s post-enactment authority—the power to identify, modify, or direct funds after the General Appropriations Act (GAA) becomes law. This was the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) model: a congressman receives his lump-sum allocation and, like a feudal lord, directs which projects and which contractors feast on it.

The ruling was a thunderclap. The political class shuddered, then shrugged, then innovated.

The Gray Zone of Pre-Enactment Insertions

What emerged is the ghost that now haunts every budget season: the pre-enactment insertion. The game no longer requires waiting for the GAA’s ink to dry. Instead, the butchery happens inside the legislative slaughterhouse itself—during committee hearings at the House, during the Senate’s own amendments, and most crucially, in the darkened rooms of the bicameral conference committee. By the time the enrolled bill reaches the President’s desk, the “insertions” are no longer post-enactment interventions by individual legislators. They are, on paper, the sovereign act of Congress itself, laundered through the institutional process and immunized against Belgica challenges.

This is the “gray zone” Ridon’s proceduralism is designed to protect. When he demands, “How could there be insertions when the NEP is not yet with us?” he is wielding the calendar as a shield against a question the calendar was never meant to answer. Magalong’s claim that insertions have “bumalik na naman” (returned again) does not require a 2027 NEP to be sitting on Speaker Dy’s desk. It could—and based on every budget cycle since 2013, almost certainly does—refer to the informal, pre-NEP horse-trading already underway. The calls to Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) regional directors. The “wish lists” being collated by the appropriations chair’s office. The quiet assurances given to contractors that their districts will be “taken care of” once the formal game begins.

Ridon knows this. He is a veteran of these halls. His outrage is not about the impossibility of the crime but the impatience of the accuser. Magalong broke the unwritten rule: you do not call out the heist before the vault door has officially opened, even if the safecrackers are already in the building, blueprints in hand.

The Myth of the Insertion-Free 2026 Budget

This brings us to the second, more cynical layer of the alibi: the myth of the “insertion-free” 2026 budget.

Ridon declares that Congress, the Senate, and the President “ensured” the 2026 GAA was cleansed of all congressional insertions. This is a statement so brazenly at odds with documented reality that it deserves to be framed and hung in a museum of political gaslighting.

Who vouched for this pristine, pork-free budget? None other than Rep. Mikaela “Mika” Suansing, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee—the very woman Magalong now claims is allegedly complaining that she has secured “the biggest insertion” for the coming cycle. In October 2025, Suansing held a press conference to personally guarantee the House version contained “no pork barrel, no hidden funding.” She felt compelled to repeat this assurance days later, in Filipino, as if the first denial had already wilted under the heat of public disbelief.

She was right to be nervous. The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) subsequently dissected the same House bill and found a rather inconvenient detail: the district of incoming Speaker Faustino Dy III alone received P23 billion in proposed DPWH insertions—triple the agency’s original allocation. The districts of Suansing and her sister, Sultan Kudarat Rep. Bella Suansing, ranked second and third in this insertion bonanza. The chair who certified the budget as pork-free was, by the cold math of PCIJ’s analysis, one of its prime beneficiaries.

This is the context Ridon’s procedural victory dance deliberately omits. It allows him to cast Magalong as an irresponsible fabulist rather than what he actually is: a messenger with a regrettably consistent track record. The flood-control scandal Magalong helped expose has already yielded plunder charges against former Rep. Elizaldy Co, who alleged P100 billion in insertions personally ordered by President Marcos and Speaker Romualdez. Senators have been charged. Contractors have testified to 25% kickback demands. The man Ridon dismisses as a liar has been the catalyst for the most significant anti-corruption reckoning in a decade.

Yet the congressmen—particularly those now wearing the righteous robes of impeachment prosecutors—remain untouched. Magalong’s frustration that “congressman wala pa” (congressmen are not yet facing cases) is the cry of someone watching a two-tiered justice system protect its own. When he notes that some of these same congressmen are “nakangiti” (smiling) on the prosecution team, he is not spinning conspiracy theories. He is describing the macabre spectacle of an institution investigating itself.

Impeachment Storm and the Two-Tiered System

The impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte hangs over this entire drama like a gathering storm. The prosecution team, including Ridon, is tasked with proving she betrayed public trust and misused public funds. Magalong’s allegation—that some prosecutors are themselves compromised by the very species of corruption they are prosecuting—is a political bomb. Ridon’s immediate, furious response is not merely institutional defense. It is preemptive self-preservation.

This does not absolve Magalong. His pattern is maddening: vivid allegations, precise numbers (67 congressmen, 30-40% kickbacks), and a persistent refusal to name names in a forum where accountability can attach. “I will submit it to the proper authorities” is a respectable shield for a whistleblower. Repeated a fourth time without a single formal complaint, it begins to look less like caution and more like a brand strategy. The public deserves the list. Not because Ridon demands it, but because the dead who died crossing collapsed, substandard bridges deserve it.

The Architecture of Legal Corruption

Here lies the tragic architecture of our corruption: it is perfectly legal until proven otherwise, and proving otherwise requires evidence held by the very people who profit from its destruction. The budget process is a Rube Goldberg machine designed for opacity, where billions can be redirected through “unprogrammed appropriations” and “leadership funds” while the public is placated with semantic reassurances that the word “PDAF” no longer appears in the statute books.

So who wins this duel? Ridon wins the clock. Magalong wins the history. Both men are, in their own ways, performing for an audience that has learned to expect spectacle over justice. The loser, as always, is the truth—which is not found in press statements or morning show interviews but in the DPWH procurement documents, the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) Special Allotment Release Orders, and the bank records of contractors who have become billionaires building ghost projects.

My challenge to both men is the same: Stop talking. Start filing. Magalong, submit your evidence to the Ombudsman under oath. Ridon, open every line of the 2026 GAA’s pre-bicameral drafts to an independent PCIJ-style audit. Let the documents speak. Because right now, you are both asking us to trust you—a mayor who won’t name names and a prosecutor who insists a budget his own chair benefited from is “insertion-free.”

The Filipino people have trusted this theater long enough. Show us the receipts, not the script.

May the rule of law rise on the third day.

— Barok 

Key Citations

A. Reports & Studies

B. Court Decisions

C. News Articles

D. Official & Biographical Sources

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