CHICKENPIE.Manila floods every year. This year the money floods too — straight out the back door.
Nine thousand eight hundred fifty-five flood control projects. Five hundred forty-five billion pesos. Fifteen contractors got a hundred billion of it between them. Do that math and it stops looking like an accident and starts looking like a business model.
Some of those projects don't exist. Not "delayed." Not "over budget." Gone — never poured, never dug, filed as finished on a spreadsheet somewhere in Bulacan. The rest are the kind that dissolve the first time it actually rains, which, this being the Philippines, is often.
So the monsoon comes back. Obviously. It always does. And the water finds every gap where a seawall should've been, every creek where a drainage channel should've been, every barangay hall where a working pump should've been. The water isn't corrupt. The water is just doing its job. It's the only party involved that showed up.
Meanwhile the World Bank cut the growth forecast. Not because the economy broke — because investors watched fifteen names collect a hundred billion pesos for concrete that never set and decided that's a business environment, not a rounding error.
Here's the part that should bother you more than the number. Nobody's surprised. We've done this dance before — public outrage, a Senate hearing with good lighting, a resolution, a promise. Then the rain stops, the floodwater recedes, and so does everyone's attention span. Outrage has a drainage problem too.
Somewhere in a barangay right now there's a plaque bolted to a wall, commemorating a flood control project. The plaque is the only part of the project that's waterproof.
