DPWH celebrates infrastructure that exists in budget documents, press releases, and the imagination

Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

The Awards Ceremony, As Described

MANILA — The Department of Public Works and Highways held what one official described as an informal recognition event for infrastructure projects that have demonstrated excellence in the category of existing primarily as approved budget line items rather than as physical structures in the material world.

The ceremony, which was not publicly announced and which this reporter learned about from a source who asked not to be named because he still has to attend meetings with these people, honored thirteen flood control projects across Metro Manila and Central Luzon that have collectively received P4.2 billion in appropriations over the past three fiscal years and collectively produced approximately 2.7 kilometers of drainage improvements, a ratio that the DPWH’s fictional Bureau of Creative Infrastructure Accounting calls within acceptable variance.

The winning project, a flood mitigation system in a low-lying municipality of Bulacan that has flooded every rainy season for forty years, received P800 million in funding across two budget cycles. Field inspection by a journalist who shall remain nameless found a canal that had been partially widened and then left, a concrete structure of indeterminate purpose, and a sign announcing that the area was the site of a DPWH flood control project funded under Republic Act something-or-other.

The Official Position

The DPWH has consistently maintained that project delays are attributable to factors beyond the agency’s control, including right-of-way acquisition issues, adverse weather during construction, changes in project scope required by local government partners, and the general principle that infrastructure in a country with the Philippines’ geological and meteorological complexity takes time. These explanations are not entirely without merit. Right-of-way acquisition is genuinely difficult in densely populated areas. Weather does affect construction. Scope changes do happen.

What they do not explain is the consistent pattern across administrations, across regions, across project types, in which budgeted infrastructure does not become completed infrastructure at the rate that the budgets suggest it should. The Commission on Audit has flagged this pattern annually. The findings are discussed, attributed to systemic issues, and then the next budget is approved. The systemic issues remain systemic.

According to Dr. Herminia Santos-Aguinaldo of the fictional Philippine Institute for Infrastructure Archaeology, some of the country’s most important flood control assets are entirely invisible — they exist in completed project records but cannot be located in the physical landscape. We call these quantum drainage systems, she explained. They exist in a state of superposition between completion and non-completion until a reporter with a camera tries to observe them. Manila Bulletin has observed several. They collapsed into the non-completion state immediately.

Philippine Star reports that the DPWH has announced a new monitoring system that will ensure greater transparency in project implementation. The system will be fully operational, officials say, within 18 months, pending budget allocation, procurement, and the completion of a feasibility study on monitoring systems.

The Infrastructure of Accountability

The ghost project problem in the Philippines is not primarily a problem of corrupt individuals, though corrupt individuals exist and are sometimes caught and occasionally prosecuted. It is a problem of institutional architecture — the systems for procurement, oversight, inspection, and accountability that determine whether appropriated funds become completed infrastructure or completed paperwork. These systems exist. The Commission on Audit functions. The Ombudsman has a mandate. Courts have jurisdiction. The problem is the gap between the existence of these systems and their operational effectiveness — the delays, the procedural complexity, the difficulty of proving fraud rather than incompetence, the political environment in which accountability is sometimes pursued vigorously and sometimes not, depending on factors that have nothing to do with the merits of the case. Improving these systems is the unglamorous work of institutional reform that takes decades and never generates a press conference. It is, however, the work that determines whether the next P4.2 billion produces 2.7 kilometers of drainage or the drainage that the appropriation intended. The fictional Bureau of Creative Infrastructure Accounting has no recommendation on this. The real Commission on Audit does. Its recommendations accumulate in the same cabinet as the previous ones, waiting for the administration that will read them.

The Bigger Picture

Whatever the specific story — budgets that don’t balance, traffic that doesn’t move, workers who leave to support the families they cannot stay with, storms that arrive on schedule, athletes who unite a nation briefly, infrastructure that exists mainly on paper, journalists who ask the questions officials prefer not to answer, foods that carry a culture across oceans, faiths that survive the gap between their ideals and their institutions, vehicles that resist becoming something else — the Philippines is a country in conversation with itself about what it wants to be. This conversation is noisy, contentious, frequently hilarious, and genuinely important. It happens in barangay halls and Senate chambers, in press conferences and social media threads, in OFW group chats and Sunday homilies, in the jeepney that hasn’t been modernized yet and the one that has. The conversation is ongoing. It has been ongoing since 1898 at least and arguably since much earlier. It will continue. The outcomes are uncertain. The participation is not. Filipinos engage with their country’s problems with an energy and a creativity that the problems themselves have not yet exhausted. This, in the end, is what the news from Manila is really about, on any given week, beneath whatever the specific headline happens to be.

More satire: NewsThump | The Onion

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com