Déjà Vu: The Flood of Corruption Engulfs the Philippines Again

After billions lost to flood control fraud, ghost projects, and political kickbacks in the Philippines, the current flood control scandal is just the latest in a long line of corruption cases. This article looks at how officials and their accomplices profit while weak oversight and entrenched practices ensure that patterns repeat, suggesting efforts to curb corruption by focusing on the structural determinants that enable it.

Flood Control as a Corruption Playground

In 2025, investigators at the Philippines Department of Justice and the National Bureau of Investigation uncovered a network of ghost projects, padded contracts, and kickbacks disguised as flood control and disaster prevention. Beginning with the testimony of a mid-level engineer, the scandal now implicates politicians, contractors, and officials.

Among those implicated are sitting and former senators and lawmakers, inter alia the speaker and four of the six representatives from Quezon City, reported as having diverted billions of pesos. The method is simple: insert projects into the national budget, award contracts to friendly companies, and collect percentages. Several congressional representatives may also have benefited from self-owned or family-owned contractors winning flood control and other public works projects. Not only politicians, but also engineers and contractors skimmed funds, resulting in more than 400 “ghost projects” that were never implemented – not counting substandard ones.

A History of Greed

In the year 2024 Undersecretary Bernardo also had a large allocation of funds […] amounting to P2.85B [approx. 49 million US$]. Here there was a change in the percentage for the proponent, which now reach 30% for flood control and 25% for other types of projects, which I also gave to Undersecretary Bernardo through my driver. (Engineer Henry Alcantara sworn affidavit, transl.)

For many Filipinos, this feels like déjà vu – a familiar pattern in Philippine history.

The most prominent points of reference are the largely unsuccessful efforts to recover assets plundered by the Marcos-couple during their years in power (1965-1986) and to bring at least the former president’s wife, Imelda Marcos, to justice. Further, in 2001, former President Joseph Estrada was charged with patrimonial plunder. His conviction in 2007 revealed a network linking congress members, governors, police, and officials profiting alongside him. However, Estrada was pardoned weeks later.

Subsequent scandals include fertilizer fund overpricing (2006–2007), Northrail project overpricing (2008), arms procurement kickbacks and illegal “send-off” payments for top generals (2011), the pork-barrel scandal (2014), graft charges against Vice President Binay (2014), PhilHealth and Pharmally overpricing (2019–2020), and 2023 allegations involving the Vice President and Secretary of Education in spending over 500 million PhP in confidential funds.

These scandals follow a familiar cycle: media uproar, committee hearings, politicians claiming smear campaigns, Ombudsman investigations, court cases and finally – in most cases – acquittals. Political survival is common. Estrada was re-elected as Manila mayor after his conviction; his son Jinggoy continued as senator despite charges; former President Arroyo weathered multiple cases and returned to the House. Vice President Binay’s career ended in 2016, but his family remains in control of Makati City, the Philippine financial center. His daughter Nancy, former Senator until 2025 and implicated in the recent scandal, holds the “family-inherited” position of Makati-City mayor.

Combined with Murder?

While corruption makes the headlines, it is accompanied by a significant number of political killings, usually at city, municipal, and barangay (ward or village) levels. Given near-total impunity, the approximately 100 annual killings of local politicians cannot be directly linked to corruption or political competition. However, indicators suggest a connection, including with the murder of journalists reporting on local scandals.

Coinciding with growing awareness of project irregularities, over the past year a number of killings have targeted engineers from local governments and the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH). While no direct links can be established, the deaths of fourteen engineers since January 2023 – six from the DPWH and eight from subnational governments – are concerning.

In one municipality – until 2025 governed by a mayor and vice-mayor, convicted and sentenced to several life imprisonments after more than a decade for corruption – two key officials, the municipal accountant and engineer, were murdered in March and July 2025. These positions are critical for managing infrastructure projects locally. While the former mayor could not stand for reelection, two of his close relatives took over as mayor and vice mayor, with several others as members of the municipal council. Although concrete evidence is lacking, such cases signal a dangerous climate for whistleblowers.

The Architecture of Corruption

In 2022, former New York Mafia boss Michael Franzese published a book describing “Mafia Democracy” in the U.S. His core idea – treating politics as a network of mafia-like rackets – offers insight.

Applying broadly similar lenses to the Philippines, past studies – including this author’s work on mafia-style domination in single provinces and provincial comparisons – highlight a “changeless land”, as David Timberman put it in 1991. Other scholars have portrayed the country as an “anarchy of families” (McCoy, 1994); as ravaged by booty capitalism and dominated by a patrimonial oligarchic elite (Paul Hutchcroft, 1998); as a “Cacique democracy” (Benedict Anderson 1988); as gripped by bossism with the state apparatus subordinated to elected officials manning “an interlocking, multitiered directorate of bosses, who use their control over the state apparatus to exploit the archipelago’s human and natural resources” (Sidel 1999); or an oligarchy defending wealth (Winters, 2011). Allen Hicken et al. (2019) emphasize “money politics, patronage, and clientelism” and “local machines constructed around powerful candidates, factions and clans,” whereas Miann Banaag et al (2017) use the well-established metaphorical triad of “guns, goons and gold” as a shortcut to Philippine politics and Acuna et al (2025) remind the reader of the unbroken power of political dynasties.

All of these catchwords highlight the core features of a hybrid regime in which the pursuit or defense of wealth, personalism, greed, protection, and violent coercion reinforce one another, creating feedback loops that sustain the political dynasties dominating Philippine politics and persistently high levels of corruption at all levels.

The Five Pillars of Political Corruption

Wealth underpins the scandals in two forms as pursuit and defense. Flood control and many other public funds – involving billions of pesos – are controlled by politicians with virtually unrestricted access. The fractured Congress, effectively an “anarchy of individual legislators,” incentivizes privatizing public funds. Because “wealth” is a de facto requisite for reelection, legislators unable to rely on party or state resources for reelection are systemically encouraged to divert funds or seek rents from illegal business such as illegal gambling. This practice of wealth generation and defense is strengthened by its perceived normalization during past decades, suggesting to the individual politician that such acts are justifiable because others do the same.

Personalism drives loyalty to individuals over institutions. Bureaucrats and contractors comply with individual politicians’ demands, accepting cuts of 10-30% in exchange for a share in the misappropriated funds or additional kickbacks. Refusal is rarely feasible, as past experience shows that high-ranking politicians are largely above the law. Compliance allows officials and contractors to benefit from privatized public resources.

Greed is both motive and amplifier of corruption. It makes politicians accumulate far more than necessary for survival, rationally assuming that others behave similarly and that risk is low. Public officials, from generals to PhilHealth bureaucrats act similarly. In one failed project, a Chinese contractor reportedly tried to withdraw due to ballooning corruption costs.

Protection ensures persistence by creating a reasonable expectation of impunity. Networks of implicated politicians, bureaucrats, and contractors secure mutually protective silence. Committees of peers may investigate, but the judiciary rarely intervenes. High-ranking politicians benefit from the courts’ extremely strict interpretation of the principle of ‘proof beyond a reasonable doubt,’ which sets evidentiary standards so high they are practically unattainable as long as politicians avoid making obvious mistakes. Even cases against the Marcos family dating from the 1980s were eventually dismissed in the past decade, with some lingering in the courts for almost 40 years. This allowed Imelda Marcos and other family members to leverage billions of dollars plundered during the dictatorship to relaunch their political careers.

Violence, as threat or practice, acts as a threatening backstop. The killing of investigative journalists, as well as threats and murders of politicians and government employees, signal risks to witnesses or whistleblowers. High-profile cases like the Davao Death Squad show that even with eyewitness testimony, judicial action is not forthcoming, signaling that high-ranking politicians are above the law.

Within a system dominated by political families, the five pillars of political corruption – wealth, personalism, greed, protection, and violence – interact  to create self-reinforcing structures. These dynamics ensure that corrupt practices repeat over time, making scandals such as the flood control case less an anomaly than a predictable expression of enduring systemic patterns.

Entrenched Practices, Daunting Fixes

Corruption in the Philippines spans sectors and levels of government, from roads and bridges to hospitals, ports, and housing. Legislators routinely insert projects into the budget, creating predictable opportunities for misappropriation. Patronage, kickbacks, and fraud persist because a significant portion of the political class treats politics primarily as a means of personal enrichment, while weak oversight and widespread impunity make it a low-risk, high-return endeavor.

Since cultural engineering is largely a futile endeavor, efforts to curb corruption should focus on the structural determinants that enable it.

The first measure is to establish stronger systems of control that ensure transparency and can detect and report anomalies in public spending. Oversight institutions, such as the Commission on Audit, need to be reinforced. Inspections should be more thorough and conducted on-site, requiring additional personnel – which would likely pay for itself. This must be combined with an end to impunity. Here a straightforward remedy is to strengthen law enforcement so that corruption is consistently met with conviction.

Finally, the political system itself, which currently relies on the election of individuals from local to national levels, requires reform. One potential solution is the introduction of a party-list system that reduces the dominance of individual politicians, delinks elected officials from entrenched clientelist networks, and replaces personal political machines with stronger institutional structures. This should be coupled with a prohibition of party hopping, ensuring that legislators who leave their party continue as independent members of congress.

All these measures represent uphill battles. However, without getting them started, those with the means and opportunity will continue to divert public resources for personal gain, systematically undermining the public good.