A lawmaker yesterday demanded the resignation of Public Works Secretary Manuel Bonoan amid perceived irregularities in flood control projects.
“Mahiya ka naman (Shame on you). Resign now,” Bacolod City Lone District Rep. Alfredo Benitez said in a statement after President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. expressed anger over a non-existent P55-million riverwall project in Barangay Piel in Baliuag, Bulacan.
Benitez noted that during the hearing of the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee Tuesday, Bonoan admitted being aware of “ghost” flood control projects in many parts of the country.
“The principle of command responsibility demands that the secretary step down,” the lawmaker said.
Benitez earlier called on Bonoan to take a leave of absence amid the probe into DPWH flood projects. However, he said this would no longer suffice.
He said what President Marcos discovered in his Baliuag inspection “poses a danger to communities who depend on these projects to keep them safe.”
“The DPWH secretary should resign now,” Benitez said.
For his part, Senator Panfilo Lacson on Wednesday bared a recurring pattern of “systemic” corruption in the country’s flood control projects.
In a privilege speech, Lacson said the anomalies in flood control projects follow a pattern: funds are inserted into the national budget, then channeled to projects that are either overpriced, repeatedly repaired to justify ballooning costs, poorly built and quickly damaged, or never constructed at all.
“Based on our investigation, the pattern is almost the same on how crooks massacre people’s money,” Lacson said.
He said the cycle is enabled by collusion among contractors, local officials, and syndicates within the DPWH.
Lacson added that engineers and contractors are ready to testify on syndicates inside the DPWH if given protection.
The senator said among the cases flagged were the Candaba flood control in Pampanga, which ballooned from P20 million to P274 million in repeated repairs; the Bauang River Basin in La Union, where allocations rose from P100 million to nearly P1.6 billion through insertions; and Naujan, Oriental Mindoro, which received nearly P19 billion in three years but still saw dikes collapsing after rains.
In Bulacan, Lacson said at least 30 “ghost projects” where funds were released but no construction was undertaken.
Lacson said more than P1.9 trillion has been allocated for flood control since 2011, including over P1 trillion in the past three years.
For his part, Senator Sherwin Gatchalian criticized the DPWH for awarding billion-peso flood-control projects to contractors with insufficient capital.
“There are people manipulating the pre-qualification stage of procurement. Some form of collusion or corruption occurs in awarding contracts to undercapitalized contractors. How did an underfunded contractor manage to win such a large project?”
Gatchalian said underfunded contractors are more likely to cut corners and deliver poor-quality projects, citing a case where a company with just P1.2 million in capitalization was granted a project worth P1.5 billion.
Senate Minority Leader Vicente Sotto III reinforced the call for transparency and filed Senate Bill 1215, a measure proposing the creation of an Independent People’s Commission to investigate anomalies in government infrastructure projects.
“Corruption is now seen, heard, and felt by Filipinos more than ever. The failed flood-control projects that are supposed to protect lives, livelihoods, and properties of our countrymen, the dilapidated classrooms for our students, and the lack of quality farm-to-market roads to aid our farmers, all are engulfed in corruption, hindering the progress of the nation as a whole,” he said.
Sotto lamented that existing investigative agencies do not specialize in scrutinizing infrastructure-related corruption.
As this developed, the Department of Budget and Management backed a proposal to realign P250 billion worth of flood control allocations for the construction of classrooms and other education sector needs.
Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman said the DBM is inclined to support the suggestion raised by Batangas Rep. Leandro Leviste as long as the Department of Education could efficiently spend such a huge allocation.
“The executive proposes the budget and then we leave it to Congress whether you think it’s wise to cut the flood control budget and move it to education, but we welcome such because, again, the theme of our budget for next year will be really to increase our investment and spending in education,” Pangandaman said in a budget briefing at the House of Representatives.
“As long as the Department of Education can fully utilize the added allocation for the construction of classrooms, that would be okay,” she added.
Leviste proposed during the Development Budget Coordination Committee briefing on Monday that the P274 billion worth of flood control budget in next year’s P6.7 trillion budget be allocated to building classrooms.
“The President has indicated that flood control projects are a possible source of corruption, and yet the 2026 NEP includes over P250 billion in flood control projects while the provision for new classrooms is at P13 billion,” Leviste said.
“Based on the substandard and overpriced (DPWH) projects we have seen, closing the gap on the classroom shortage seems to be a much wiser use of taxpayers’ money than DPWH flood control projects in the 2026 budget,” the lawmaker added.
Last year, President Marcos vetoed more than P16 billion worth of flood control projects under the P6.3 trillion national budget for 2025.
