Trillion Peso March: Rising flood of people, not ghosts, but real

No, what is unfolding day after day toward the Sept. 21 Martsa ng Bayan (March of the Nation) is not, to borrow Shakespeare’s words, “a walking shadow… a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.”

Neither is it “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

What the nation is seeing take shape is no mere spectacle, no passing fit of political theater. It is the gathering response of a people who, for too long, have been robbed blind and treated as if their outrage were irrelevant. The coming march is not an empty exercise — it is a reckoning, perhaps even a turning point, against the monstrous flood-control scandal that has already siphoned away at least a trillion pesos from the Filipino people.

This is not just theft — it is theft weaponized against our future. A trillion pesos gone is a trillion pesos not spent to cure the sick, educate our children, or strengthen our communities. It is a trillion pesos transformed into the cement of corruption, poured over our hospitals, our schools, our moral fiber, suffocating hope.

The Trillion Peso March is the people’s answer to a reign of greed so brazen, so unrepentant, that one meme captures it perfectly: “sinindikato ang buong gobyerno.” The government itself has been made a syndicate — operating not as a guardian of the common good, but as a criminal enterprise.

FINGER POINTING AND CONNECTING THE DOTS
When former Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) Secretary Rogelio Singson said bluntly, “Lahat sila involved (all of them are involved),” he was not indulging in exaggeration. He was naming what has long been obvious: that the rot runs not only through contractors but through legislators, senators, and members of the executive branch itself.

The finger-pointing has begun, and in that desperate exercise, the lines connecting one corrupt hand to another have only become clearer.

Consider: this scandal did not emerge from Congress. Neither Senate nor House initiated the exposé. It came from the President himself, who in his July 28 State of the Nation Address declared that of the P545 billion allocated for flood control, some P100 billion went to only 15 contractors since July 2022 — many of those projects in areas not even among the most flood-prone.

If this was meant as candor, it was a poisoned gift. For the President is not merely an observer. He is head of the executive branch, responsible for both DPWH and the Department of Budget and Management. His disclosure is not neutral; it is an admission of command responsibility.

Then came Senator Ping Lacson, unveiling in August that 67 lawmakers had been double-dealing — acting both as legislators who secure funds and contractors who pocket them. Forty percent commissions on projects became standard loot, with DPWH officials, Commission on Audit auditors, and bidding committees taking their cuts like practiced vultures.

This is not simply corruption — it is cannibalism. Lawmakers carve into the very body of the nation they swore to protect. And they do so with the cold logic of seasoned predators.

THE PRICE OF CRIMINAL BUDGETING
The mechanics are clear enough: improper budget insertions at the House Appropriations, the Senate Finance Committee, or the bicameral conference. The law forbids inflating the budget, so funds are siphoned by deprioritizing what matters most: hospitals, schools, roads, healthcare, teachers, bridges.

Two blows fall on the Filipino taxpayer.

First, we are left with a skeletal state: too few hospital beds, too few doctors, crumbling schools, underpaid teachers, textbooks that arrive years late. No wonder our students rank among the lowest worldwide in math, science, and reading. No wonder our infrastructure lags behind even our Southeast Asian neighbors.

Second, the projects we do receive are often ghostly in every sense — nonexistent, half-finished, or completed with materials so substandard they may as well not exist. And when the rains come, it is we who drown — sometimes literally — in the floods these fraudulent projects were supposed to prevent.

CRACKS IN THE SYNDICATE
But even the most disciplined cartel eventually shows fissures.

The DPWH district office in Bulacan has already begun to betray its own, exposing millions of pesos stacked in offices like loot waiting to be dispatched. This is not hearsay, not rumor — it is evidence. Senator Lacson has signaled he will go further, demanding CCTV recordings of bagmen delivering cash to legislators.

Other institutions have stirred as well. President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. has created an Independent Commission for Infrastructure. The House has floated legislation to form a body with subpoena and contempt powers. These may sound promising, but they could still be fragile, perhaps cosmetic. Unless armed with real authority and real independence, such commissions risk becoming just another diversion, another mask worn by the same old face of impunity.

The people will not be placated by scapegoats or token resignations. Changing figureheads in DPWH or Congress is no cure when the same mold infects the entire structure.

Justice demands more: prison for both public officials and private contractors guilty of plunder. Full recovery of stolen funds. Confiscation of ill-gotten assets. Anything less is betrayal.

FREEZING THE BLOOD MONEY
There are flickers of action worth noting.

The Court of Appeals has approved the Anti–Money Laundering Council’s petition to freeze 135 bank accounts and 27 insurance policies linked to the scandal. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas is investigating under the Anti-Financial Account Scamming Act (Afasa Law), criminalizing money mules and asset laundering. Twenty DPWH personnel and private contractors are under freeze orders.

But here lies the test: will these moves end with frozen accounts that quietly thaw months later? Or will they end in confiscation, conviction, and restitution?

Ghost projects cannot be fought with ghost accountability.

WHAT THE MARCH MUST DEMAND
The Martsa ng Bayan cannot afford to dissolve into incoherence and irrelevance.

To call for mass resignations would be reckless, leaving a constitutional vacuum that benefits no one but the guilty. To demand voluntary resignations is naïve — our politicians abandoned delicadeza (propriety) long ago.

What is needed is sharper, lawful, and relentless insistence for:

• A comprehensive independent investigation of all flood control projects of the last decade.

• Forensic accounting to flush out hidden assets.

• Criminal charges against all with probable cause.

• Confiscation of frozen and laundered assets for the Republic.

• Public oversight at every stage, to guard against whitewash and neglect.

The march must be the people’s declaration that the Republic is not theirs to steal.

ANGER, BUT DISCIPLINED ANGER
Yes, anger is inevitable. Anger is righteous. As Archbishop Soc Villegas reminds us: “If you don’t know how to get angry at the corruption, at the money that should be given to the poor but goes to the pocket of powerful people, then something is wrong with your Christianity.”

But let our anger not descend into mob vengeance. Due process remains essential. No one should be above scrutiny — but no one should be condemned without trial.

For what we are fighting is not just theft of money. It is the theft of justice, the corruption of decency, the erosion of trust itself. To answer that theft with lawlessness would only repeat the crime in another form.

The Trillion Peso March is not a mere march. It is the people’s testimony: that we see the rot, that we connect the dots, that we will not be silent.

What was stolen was not just pesos, but dignity. What was looted was not just the treasury, but the promise of our children.

So let us march, not in the hope that the powerful will suddenly rediscover shame, but to prove that the powerless many are no longer afraid.

The flood that rises now is not of water, but of people.

And unlike the ghost projects, this flood is real.