CHICKENPIE.Senator Lacson stands up. He says he will scrutinize the ₱107.4 billion flood control budget. He said this last year too. Different flood, same podium, same face doing the same concerned squint.
Meanwhile the Discayas are telling the Blue Ribbon committee, under oath, that seventeen congressmen wanted twenty-five percent. Not ten. Not fifteen. Twenty-five, like a service charge quietly added to your bill. Corruption in this country stopped hiding a while ago. Now it itemizes. It has line items. It probably has a cover sheet.
We keep calling these hearings "scrutiny." They're reruns. Same actors. Same script. Same ending: a strongly worded resolution nobody enforces, a few sound bites for the evening news, and a budget that gets approved anyway, minus maybe one press release's worth of shame.
Here's the part that should bother you more than the kickback number. ₱107.4 billion is enough to actually fix drainage in half of Metro Manila. It is also, coincidentally, roughly enough to cover seventeen congressmen's cut, a few ghost projects in Bulacan with real names and fake concrete, a Blue Ribbon hearing room's worth of bottled water, and a small mountain of tarpaulins printed with the words "Bagong Pilipinas" that will not, in fact, hold back a single drop of water.
Nobody in that room is surprised. That's the joke nobody's telling. The senators aren't shocked. The contractors aren't nervous. The public isn't even outraged anymore, not really — outrage requires energy, and we've been rationing it since 2023, spending it in small careful amounts like the last load on a prepaid meter.
So the hearing continues. Someone will call it a "wake-up call." It is not a wake-up call. A wake-up call implies you were asleep. We've been awake this whole time, watching the water rise on the same street, past the same "flood control project" sign, funded by the same budget line that keeps getting scrutinized and never gets smaller. Next year the sign will still be there. It will just be more waterlogged.
The rain comes back every June, right on schedule. So does the hearing. Bring an umbrella. Bring popcorn too — you already know how this season ends. You've seen the finale. You've seen every episode of the finale.
