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Ghost Train: How Malacañang Derailed Mindanao’s Railway to Bury a Duterte Legacy

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Louis ‘Barok’ Biraogo

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How a Feasibility Study Became the Perfect Alibi for Killing a Region’s Dream

By Louis ‘Barok‘ C. Biraogo — September 8, 2026

IN THE hallowed, air-conditioned halls of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM), where fiscal prudence is often invoked to mask political convenience, a murder has just been committed. The victim? Not a person, but a promise.

The Mindanao Railway Project (MRP)—the first of its kind in the region—has been found strangled to death in the proposed 2027 National Expenditure Program (NEP), its budget line showing a macabre, absolute zero.

For the uninitiated, this is not a bureaucratic oversight. This is a state-sanctioned declaration that Mindanao’s iron-horse aspirations are, for all intents and purposes, dead on arrival.

The official line coming from the DBM and certain quarters of the Department of Transportation (DOTr) is a soothing lullaby of “project readiness,” “absorptive capacity,” and the ever-reliable excuse of “fiscal space.” But we at the Kweba know better. We’ve smelled this particular brand of political decay before.

Let us state the obvious, which the sycophantic Manila-centric media seems to have missed: the MRP is a Duterte-era flagship. It cuts through the heart of Davao, the political fiefdom of the now-declared enemy of the state, the Duterte dynasty.

The project’s slow, agonizing death via budgetary asphyxiation has occurred in perfect sync with the Marcos administration’s brutal campaign to dismantle the legacy of its predecessor and vanquish its political foes.

“To the Victor Go the Spoils. To Mindanao Go the Studies.”

The “Technical” Excuse as a Political Fig Leaf

The DBM’s defense is as predictable as a monsoon in August. They clutch their pearls over the lack of a “confirmed financing source” after the government, in a fit of geopolitical pique or perhaps a misguided sense of fiscal independence, dropped Chinese official development assistance (ODA) like a hot siopao.

They whine about an “incomplete feasibility study,” conveniently forgetting that this study was being updated under their watch, a process that has dragged on with the urgency of a carabao wading through molasses.

This is theater. The tragedy is that the actors are convincing.

Let’s look at the numbers, shall we? The DOTr’s budget for 2027 is a tale of two cities. The Metro Manila Subway, the Light Rail Transit Line 1 (LRT-1) extension, the Metro Rail Transit Line 3 (MRT-3) rehab—all funded. All “foreign-assisted.”

The locally-funded projects with the audacity to exist outside the imperial capital? Metro Rail Transit Line 4 (MRT-4)? Zero. Philippine National Railways (PNR) South Long Haul? Zero. Mindanao Railway? A big, fat, symbolic zero.

This is not fiscal prudence. This is structural discrimination codified in a national budget.

The Constitution, in its often-ignored Article II, Sections 9 and 10, speaks of social justice and equitable regional development. But those are merely words on parchment when the power of the purse is wielded by a cabal seemingly intent on perpetuating a colonial-era model of a hyper-centralized Luzon.

The claim of a “project-readiness gap” is the most infuriating part. The government has already spent public funds to relocate 159 families. They have spent on right-of-way acquisition.

They have created victims—people uprooted from their homes—for a railway whose construction is now indefinitely “on hold.” This isn’t merely irrational sequencing; it borders on cruelty.

The state has expropriated land and broken communities under the premise of a “public purpose” that it now seems unwilling or politically unable to fulfill. Under the Araullo v. Aquino doctrine, funding a non-itemized project via “savings” is unconstitutional.

But apparently, creating stranded public assets through half-executed expropriations is perfectly within the bounds of administrative discretion. Where is the Commission on Audit (COA) in all this? Where is the outrage?

The MinDA Misdirection and the PPP Mirage

The performance of Mindanao Development Authority (MinDA) Chair Leo Tereso Magno has been a masterclass in institutional cowardice. His pronouncements blaming the DOTr for the “unfinished feasibility study” are a thinly veiled attempt to deflect criticism and launder the failure of the executive branch to prioritize its own region’s development.

He offers to “explore PPP financing”—a shimmering, seductive mirage in the Philippine infrastructure landscape.

A public-private partnership (PPP) for the MRP is a joke. A private investor asks one question: “How do I get my return on capital?”

A railway in Mindanao, while socially and economically transformative, is a massive, capital-intensive project with a decades-long payback period. Without massive government subsidies, sovereign guarantees, or creative land-value capture schemes (which are legal but politically complex), no serious international consortium will touch it.

The PPP talk is a bureaucratic stalling tactic, a way to sound proactive while setting the project on a path to the graveyard. It’s the policy equivalent of prescribing vitamins for a terminal disease.

The Verdict: A Political Execution Masquerading as Policy

The true scandal is not merely the missing ₱8.53 billion in proposed early-works funding for the railway’s first phase.. The scandal is the brutal abandonment of a national commitment—a pattern of political liquidation.

Recall that in 2024, Marcos made a grand show of ordering the DOTr to secure alternative funding—a directive that has since evaporated into convenient silence. This was likely political theater, a performative utterance to quell dissent in the South while his technocrats at the DBM sharpened the knife.

The argument that we should simply “wait for a better feasibility study” is a fool’s errand. Studies don’t build railways; political will and appropriations do.

Every year of delay increases costs due to inflation and land speculation. Every year of inaction erodes investor confidence and leaves the 159 relocated families in a state of permanent limbo, living monuments to a government’s broken word.

The solution, as argued by the more rational voices in Congress like Rep. Rufus Rodriguez, is not just to restore a line item. It is to impose a framework of conditional, milestone-based funding.

The government must fund the “option” to build, not the whole thing. Congress should appropriate funds for the completion of the feasibility study, detailed engineering, and safeguards for the affected families, with a legally binding trigger that automatically releases construction funds the moment financing is secured and the study is validated.

But who are we kidding? This administration is not interested in solutions. It is interested in narratives. And the narrative it is writing is clear: to the victor go the spoils, and to the opposition’s homeland goes… nothing.

The absence of the MRP in the 2027 budget is not an economic calculation. It is a political autopsy.

The Mindanao Railway was not a project that failed a feasibility test; it was a political prisoner that failed to survive the regime change. The Marcos administration has effectively told Mindanao that its first railway will be built only when a new set of lords allows it.

And for the people of the South, that is the most damning, unforgivable message of all.

Key Citations

A. Legal and Official Sources

B. News Articles

C. Official Websites

Louis ‘Barok‘ C. Biraogo

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