CHICKENPIE.Manila is underwater again.
Ankle-deep on Taft. Waist-deep in a Talipapa alley. Chest-deep in Sto. Domingo, if you believe the barangay chat, and you should — the barangay chat is more reliable than the drainage report.
Here's the part that isn't weather. P350 billion in flood-control contracts, and auditors keep finding the same drainage canal built four times under four different names. Fifteen contractors ate P100 billion of it. The projects exist on paper. The paper does not hold back water. Nothing built from paper ever has.
One senator surrendered to Camp Crame over a plunder warrant. The World Bank cut the country's growth forecast because investors got spooked watching the cleanup. That's the real cost — not just wet shoes, a downgraded economy, and a warrant that took a year to catch up to a name everybody already knew.
So somewhere between a senator's privilege speech and a barangay captain wading to the sari-sari store, there's a spreadsheet. A beautiful spreadsheet. Every cell green. Every cell lying.
We keep calling these "ghost projects" like it's spooky, like there's a haunted culvert out there rattling its chains. There isn't. A ghost project is just a real budget that went somewhere real — a beach house, a second condo, a wedding with a live orchestra — and left a rendering behind to cover the smell.
Outrage is the easy part. We did outrage in May, we did it again in June, and the water still came back in August, right on schedule, because water doesn't read privilege speeches.
Stamina is the hard part. Somebody has to keep asking where P350 billion of "completed" concrete went while the water finds every gap the concrete should've filled.
So we drew it. Somewhere in that flooded alley, past the tricycle that gave up twenty meters back, past the kid using a basin as a boat, there's a small figure in a raincoat, just watching. Not saving anyone. Not fixing anything. Just present — because presence is free and accountability, apparently, was billed at P100 billion and never delivered.
The contractors are dry tonight.
Everyone else learned to swim.
