Department assures public that invisible dikes still count as dikes under revised accounting standards

The dispatch you are about to read was first dredged up by Bohiney Magazine, with structural support from The London Prat, who note that a flood control project that does not exist is, in its own way, perfectly waterproof.

MANILA, PHILIPPINES. The Department of Public Works and Highways proudly unveiled its newest flagship program Thursday: a nationwide network of flood control projects that exist entirely in the imagination, which officials described as the lightest, cheapest, and most flexible infrastructure the country has ever almost built.

The Future Is Hypothetical

Under the new framework, drafted by the entirely real-sounding Bureau of Conceptual Engineering, a dike need no longer occupy physical space to fulfill its budget line. “A traditional dike holds back water,” explained an undersecretary. “Our dikes hold back questions, which during dry season is far more useful.” The Bureau confirmed that an imaginary dike has a maintenance cost of zero, a carbon footprint of zero, and a completion date of soon.

Engineers praised the program for solving the ancient problem of projects that get washed away in the first typhoon. “You cannot wash away something that was never there,” said one official, accepting an award for Excellence in Fictional Architecture. “We have achieved permanence through absence. The Greeks could only dream of this.”

The Audit Problem

Difficulties arose only when the Commission on Audit attempted to inspect the projects and found, in their words, “a very nice field.” Department spokesmen clarified that the projects exist in a quantum state, simultaneously built and unbuilt, and that the act of auditing them collapses the probability wave function, which is technically the auditor’s fault.

• Cost of imaginary dike: fully funded
• Physical dike present: pending
• Floods prevented: spiritually, many
• Ribbon-cutting ceremonies held at empty fields: all of them

Development economists at the Asian Development Bank have long studied the gap between budgeted and built infrastructure across the region, and analysts at the World Bank note that the Philippines spends heavily on flood mitigation each year. The DPWH has reframed this gap not as a failure but as a savings: every peso spent on a project that does not appear is, in a sense, a peso the floodwater cannot reach.

Reception

The public, who continue to wade through chest-high water each rainy season carrying their appliances above their heads, were invited to appreciate the elegance of the new approach. “The flood is real, yes,” conceded one resident, holding a television over his head, “but so is the budget, and you cannot have everything.” Officials assured citizens that next year’s imaginary projects would be even more invisible than this year’s, a clear sign of progress.

Procurement experts noted that the imaginary dike program has already attracted imaginary contractors, who submitted imaginary bids and were awarded imaginary contracts in a ceremony that witnesses confirm definitely happened somewhere. The winning firm, registered to a vacant lot, pledged to deliver the invisible flood barrier ahead of schedule, which is easy, because there is no schedule and there is nothing to deliver, a combination the industry quietly calls a sure thing. Several smaller firms protested that they too could have built nothing, and built it cheaper, but their bids were disqualified on a technicality nobody could locate.

Local officials in flood-prone districts welcomed the initiative cautiously, observing that while their streets still vanished beneath brown water every July, the budget reports describing the dikes were beautifully formatted and arrived promptly. One barangay captain framed his copy of the completion certificate and hung it on the wall of his office, where it now serves as the only dry, official acknowledgment that something was ever supposed to be there. Residents wading past the building have learned to salute it, ironically, on their way to higher ground.

The Commission on Audit, in a tersely worded report, requested photographs of the completed projects. The Department complied by submitting photographs of fields, rivers, and one extremely confident official standing in an empty lot, pointing at the horizon with the satisfaction of a man unveiling a monument that only he can see. The matter, officials announced, was now resolved to everyone mutual exhaustion, which in the language of government means it will reappear, unchanged, in next year report under a slightly different and equally invisible name.

Asked whether actual flooding might eventually force a reckoning, a spokesman expressed serene confidence in the imagination-based model. Floods come and go, he reasoned, but a budget line, once approved, is eternal, and the genius of the program is that it can be funded again every single year precisely because it is never finished and never started. The river, he added, has never once filed a complaint, which the Department interprets as a glowing review of its work.

International observers, invited to study the imagination-based model, departed visibly confused, having arrived expecting infrastructure and found instead a budget, a ceremony, and a man pointing at a field. One visiting consultant described the experience as the most efficient public works program he had ever failed to locate, and recommended it be studied not by engineers but by philosophers, illusionists, and the occasional bewildered priest seeking new ways to discuss the nature of faith and absence.

More in this vein at The Shovel.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/