MANILA: Whenever water levels rise near her home in Barangay Del Monte in Quezon City, Robie Yambot sends her children straight to the nearest evacuation center, never knowing how bad the situation may turn.
Living in a wooden house by the creek, the family knows what it means to lose everything to flooding. But what was once a rare event during especially intense monsoon seasons has now become a regular ordeal, and each time, the floods grow more severe.
“It’s no longer like before when the floods came only every few years ... now, it’s almost every month. Every time it rains nonstop, we get flooded, and floods today are different: the water rises quickly,” Yambot told Arab News.
“My children sometimes cry because we don’t know if there will be anything left. When floods come, it’s so fast that we can’t save our belongings in time. We just focus on evacuating.”
During every election season, politicians visit the area and promise help, but over the years they have not delivered any solution.
Despite the government allocating billions of dollars for flood control, there has been no real improvement. In the Philippines — one of the world’s most typhoon-vulnerable countries — this failure has become especially acute as investigations over the past few weeks have uncovered massive corruption in flood prevention and mitigation projects.
“All that money goes into their pockets while poor people like us suffer. We can shout and cry our frustrations, but nothing happens. There’s no justice,” Yambot said.
“There should be accountability, not just endless senate hearings. It’s heartbreaking for families like ours living near the creek. The funds are there, but where did they go?”
Last month, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. announced that an internal audit of flood control spending had uncovered serious irregularities. Of the 545 billion pesos ($9.54 billion) allocated since 2022, thousands of projects were found to be substandard, lacking proper documentation, or did not exist.
Public Works and Highways Secretary Manuel M. Bonoan resigned soon after the announcement. A congressional investigation has since linked him to a “growing family business” involving government flood control projects.
As several powerful political figures have over the past few weeks been found to be implicated, Marcos last week established another independent commission led by a former supreme court justice and vowed to hold all wrongdoers accountable regardless of their status.
During a senate hearing on Sept. 3, Finance Secretary Ralph Recto said that economic losses due to corruption in flood control projects may have averaged $2.1 billion a year from 2023 to 2025, mainly due to ghost projects.
The findings have ignited public outrage, with activists, former cabinet members, Catholic church leaders, retired generals and anti-corruption watchdogs organizing numerous protests and calling for sweeping criminal prosecution.
A series of large anti-corruption demonstrations is planned across Metro Manila on Sept. 21 — a date that also marks the anniversary of the 1972 martial law declaration by Marcos’s father.
The president on Monday expressed his support for the protests, in which about 100 organizations are expected to take part.
Prof. David Michael San Juan, convener of the civic alliance Tama Na, said that about 100,000 people are expected to join the rally at Luneta, an urban park and main public gathering site in Manila.
“In every administration, there’s always a corruption case. But this time, it’s really terrible because it’s money that is supposed to be used to protect Filipinos from floods,” San Juan told Arab News.
“The Philippines is a victim of extreme climate change, just like many developing countries. So, the situation with flooding in the Philippines is so bad. And it has gotten worse in recent years. This year, it’s even worse. Even those areas that are not usually flooded are now going under water.”
When investigations into the scandal started to reveal the lavish lifestyles of those involved and names of politicians started to pop up, public anger grew.
“This can be considered as the straw that broke the camel’s back,” San Juan said, comparing the demonstrations with similar recent movements in Nepal and Indonesia, where people rose against corruption and misuse of resources.
“Filipinos are realizing that maybe we, too, should do something,” he said. “What the government is doing is not enough, that’s why we have seven demands, including to remove from their position, arrest, and imprison everyone involved in anomalous flood control projects from the time of (former president) Duterte to Marcos and so on.”
