All the President’s Men

The critical lesson in this movie is: grand corruption often starts as a small, deniable act. An enduring line from this film is: Follow the money. And another lesson is: When power refuses transparency, money provides the most honest testimony.

I would like to apply this situation to President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.'s visit last week to Tacloban City, particularly to inspect the progress of the rehabilitation work on the San Juanico Bridge, 6 months after he visited it in June.

He addressed the media and gave a short message. But what struck me was his statement that if the bridge were provided funds sufficient for maintenance in the past years, the government would not have to spend 1.1 billion pesos to rehabilitate and retrofit it now.

He mentioned the millions of pesos in losses resulting from the partial closure of the bridge, which is affecting the transport of goods. He announced that the bridge is now reopened to two-way traffic for vehicles weighing no more than 15 tons. Just enough for cars and buses, not trucks that reach a minimum of 33 tons.

What our President did not realize when he made that statement is that DPWH Region VIII made many requests for funds for the repair, but these were not approved by the DPWH Main Office. The DPWH Regional Office gave this information to the RDC Regional Project Monitoring Committee in a meeting in early June this year.

In other words, his DPWH Secretary then, Manuel Bonoan, disapproved the repeated requests. The funds released were only for the repainting and lighting of the bridge. Thus, he effectively disapproved the request.

The President said if maintenance funds were released for the retrofitting many years ago, the 1.1 billion pesos would have been saved.

Something is missing from this statement. Perhaps most of the 1.1 billion pesos would have been saved, but not the entire amount, because the government would also have spent millions of pesos on its maintenance work, anyway.

For example, the repair would also have needed the retrofitting shown in the background of the video, when he announced his reopening.

I do not relish saying this, but he indirectly said the DPWH was at fault for not providing sufficient maintenance funds much earlier and for making a substantial effort to repair the bridge only now that it is on the verge of falling apart.

It looks like the President was not adequately briefed, or his men preferred not to give him the full picture. They should have sat down and discussed the project for a couple of minutes before facing the media and making the announcement.

Also, the announcement did not specify the repair design process and whether public bidding was used. After all, 1.1 billion pesos is not peanuts, and the current administration is highlighting transparency measures like live-streaming the bidding. This failure to cite the bidding gives us the impression that, open or not, an announcement on this should have been made. The winning contractor should have been identified by the President like the ones he named in the flood control-related corruption. . .

Another point of observation: the repair cost keeps increasing. It was around 300 million pesos in June, going up to 800 million pesos; now it has been announced at a whopping 1.1 billion pesos.

There could be change orders and variations that will further increase the cost like what happened in the construction of the new Airport Building at the Tacloban City Airport Development Project which had three variation orders and many delays that seems to have increased the cost of the project by 500 million pesos, comparing the initial cost estimates and the project cost at completion. .

All because of the failure to repair it earlier the cost of repairing the bridge just got to be costlier by a billion bucks. There is negligence here, no doubt. And it cost the taxpayers a lot of money.

All the President’s men should have done a better job.

#WeTakeAStand #OpinYon #OpinYonNews #IAmBack