The Key Figure in the Philippines' Public Works Corruption Scandal

WHAT follows below is my two-part column from Tuesday, Nov. 11 and Thursday, Nov. 13 in The Manila Times, which is about an old case involving the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) in the Philippines and massive corruption that was discovered in a World Bank-funded highway project in the early 2000's. This guy (pictured) is former DPWH Secretary Manuel Bonoan, who resigned in disgrace on Sept. 1 in the wake of revelations about massive corruption involving flood-control projects under the DPWH.

On the same day that the first part of this column was published, Tuesday, Nov. 11, Bonoan, who was already tagged for investigation by the government in the more recent scandal, fled the country for "medical treatment" in the US, which is what corrupt government officials here in the Philippines do to try to avoid questioning or prosecution. 

The reason I am posting this now is that there was a development concerning this individual earlier this evening (Saturday, Nov. 29). I am not able to divulge details of that, because that is confidential business, but because what happened a) mortally offended me, both for my own sake and for the good of my organization, b) was just completely fucking wrong on moral, ethical, and common sense grounds, and c) proved that I was absolutely right in what I wrote or implied in the columns that follow (and thank you to my perceptive daughter for instantly realizing that and pointing it out), this story needs to get out there. Believe me, there are a HELL of a lot of details I have that I didn't air out publicly; you want to try me, you crooked bastard, go right ahead, and see how that works out for you. The development (that's a mild word for it, but I'll stick with that for now) this evening was so infuriating and so offensive that I have now taken a personal interest in seeing you suffer, jackass. And the individual who passed it along (not saying who that was, yet, but you know who you are) better watch out, too. I didn't want to get involved too much in this whole corruption mess, but guess what, now I am. May whatever God you subscribe to have mercy on you, because I will not. 

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The skeleton in Bonoan’s closet

Ben Kritz

Rough Trade

First of two parts (Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025).

LAST week, the Independent Commission on Infrastructure (ICI), which is beginning to look a lot less like an investigative star chamber and more like a major cog in a complicated damage-control machine, made a recommendation to the Ombudsman that former Dept. of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) secretary Manuel M. Bonoan, along with two former undersecretaries, be investigated for possible violations of the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees. This is in connection with one of the literally hundreds of flood-control projects that have so far been discovered to have been fatally compromised by graft, in this case a P72.6-million project in Plaridel, Bulacan.

The complaint, or recommendation, or FYI, or whatever it actually is that has been passed from the ICI to the Ombudsman’s office seems quite sketchy, at least as it has been reported in the news. The project itself is described as being illicit not because it wasn’t built, but because it was built somewhere other than it was supposed to be, which is just weird. That’s one clue that an organized whitewash may be underway.

A second clue is that the ICI seems to have specified that the Ombudsman look into violations of the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards, which is serious but not the same kind of dire crime that is represented by a violation of the Graft and Corrupt Practices Act, which is what is automatically implied – at least where public officials are concerned – in every one of these cases. A “recommendation” that would have raised far less public suspicion would have been for the ICI to simply inform the Ombudsman, “Here is our information, which we believe indicates illegal acts may have occurred. Please figure out which ones, if any, and proceed accordingly.” After all, that is kind of the Ombudsman’s job.

The third clue is the skeleton in Manny Bonoan’s closet with regard to the DPWH, or more specifically, not that the skeleton is there, but the way it was handled, or not handled, as the case may be.

Back in the early 2000s, World Bank funded a road improvement project here in the Philippines called the National Roads Improvement and Management Program, or NRIMP. The total project, which was originally scheduled to run from 2000 to 2009, had a total price tag of $2 billion; Phase One of the project involved a $150 million loan to the government from World Bank, with $133.2 million of that being disbursed by the loan closing date in March, 2007.

For the sake of accuracy, I will quote directly from the public version of the World Bank integrity report:
“In April 2003, INT [i.e., the Integrity Vice Presidency] was informed by the Bank team supervising the Project that the procurement process relating to the award of two NRIMP-1 contracts (the NRIMP-1 Contracts) might have been tainted by fraud and corruption. Those Contracts, with a combined estimated value of approximately P1.88 billion (US$33 million), were for the rehabilitation of parts of the Surigao-Davao Coastal Road [in Mindanao], the Kabankalan-Basay Road [in Negros], and the San Enrique-Vallehermoso Road [also in Negros]. Bank staff had determined that the results of the 2001-2002 bid process showed indications of collusion, most notably the questionable disqualification of some of the potential bidders and abnormally high bid prices. The Bank’s task team accordingly declined to issue a letter of no objection to the results of this first round, asked DPWH to re-bid, and referred the matter to INT. Finding the bid prices still unjustifiably high after the 2004 re-bid, the Bank asked DPWH to carry out a third round of bidding. The Bank ultimately decided not to provide a no-objection letter a third time, for the same reason, in 2006. The contracts were not awarded under the NRIMP project.”

To summarize what the World Bank team discovered, a well-organized cartel of DPWH officials, politicians, and foreign and domestic contractors pre-selected winning bidders for construction contracts, who bid inflated prices to cover the subsequent bribe payments, including compensation to the losing bidders, who were coached ahead of time on how much they should inflate their bids to make it look like as though the process was legitimately selecting the lowest bidders. Prospective bidders who did not cooperate would be frozen out from any future DPWH bidding.

As a result of this investigation, World Bank informed the Department of Finance and the Office of the Ombudsman in 2006 even before it was finished, and then formally turned over its complete findings in 2007. That report presumably included names of those involved, although for the sake of not compromising any criminal or administrative investigation, those are not included in the public version of the report. For its part, World Bank “blacklisted” seven companies and one individual from participating in any World Bank-backed projects for periods ranging from seven years to infinity. Since some of those sanctioned were based in China, it also shared it report with Chinese government, to support whatever action it might want to take against its own people.

So where does Manny Bonoan fit into all this? Stay tuned for Part 2 on Thursday.

Second of two parts. (Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025)

FORMER Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) Sec. Manuel M. Bonoan was named along with several others by the Independent Commission on Infrastructure (ICI) in a recommendation to the Ombudsman that the latter investigate possible illicit actions related to a P72.6-million flood control project, as was widely reported in the news. That Bonoan’s name would come up should not come as a surprise; he was, after all, in a position as DPWH secretary to know about any corrupt activities within his department. Questions about whether he actually did or not, and whether he had any involvement in them are unavoidable.

When he was appointed as DPWH secretary by President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. on June 30, 2022 – one of the first cabinet appointments the then-newly inaugurated president made – Bonoan began his second stint with the department, adding to a career that might be record-breaking in terms of its longevity. Bonoan first started working for what was then known as the Bureau of Highways in 1967, when he was still a senior in college. The 22-year-old civil engineering aide would become a sort of poster child for the DPWH, working his way up from that lowest spot on the totem pole to become an Assistant Secretary for Planning by 1987, and then being advanced to the rank of Undersecretary in 1994.

In 2000, just about the time the first phase of the World Bank-backed National Roads Improvement and Management Program (NRIMP) project was getting underway with the DPWH as the implementing agency, Bonoan was named Senior Undersecretary and made chairman of the Pre-qualification, Bids, and Awards Committee (PBAC) for Construction Projects in the Visayas and Mindanao. As explained in the first part of this column on Tuesday, World Bank later discovered that bidding and awarding of construction contracts for one component of the NRIMP, involving one road project in Mindanao and two in Negros, had been controlled by a cartel involving DPWH officials, politicians, and cooperating contractors. The ensuing investigation by World Bank’s Integrity Vice Presidency group eventually led to World Bank blacklisting seven companies and one individual, and passing its report on to the Department of Finance and the Office of the Ombudsman.

The World Bank team discovered the collusion in the results of the bidding for several contracts for work on these three highways in 2001-2002, and “declined to issue a letter of no objection.” The normal process on these types of projects being funded by World Bank or similar institutions is for bidding and awards to be carried out by the implementing agency, and then reviewed by the bank, which is sensible since the bank is one the ultimately paying for it. Normally this is a routine procedure that results in the contracts being cleared to proceed, but it wasn’t in this case. World Bank asked DPWH to conduct the bidding again, which happened in 2004, but incredibly, the same indications of collusion in the bidding were evident the second time, so again World Bank objected. A third round of bidding ensued in 2006 with the same results, at which point World Bank – which by now had already notified the DOF and Ombudsman of its investigation – put a stop to the shenanigans, withholding about $33 million of the initial $150 million loan and thus preventing these contracts from being awarded.

As senior undersecretary and chair of the PBAC for Visayas and Mindanao, Bonoan would have certainly known about the cartel, and may have even been a part of it, although the public version of the World Bank integrity report does not name anyone involved, so as not to compromise any investigative action the government might want to take. It is also not clear whether or not Bonoan’s PBAC was responsible for conducting the bidding on the NRIMP projects; they certainly did fall within his normal jurisdiction, but subsequent parts of the NRIMP project, which were implemented after 2011, used a Special Bids and Awards Committee (SBAC), which might also have been the case in 2001-2006.

Nevertheless, in his particular position as a senior undersecretary with oversight on projects in the Visayas and Mindanao, and with more than 30 years’ experience in the DPWH at that point, there is simply no way that Bonoan, if he was not involved personally, could not have known what was happening with the ‘cartel’ that had been uncovered. That he – or to be fair, no one else in DPWH – did nothing to stop it is obvious from that astonishing fact that even after the DPWH knew World Bank’s integrity people were on to them, the same sort of rigged bidding was carried out again, not once but twice.

And what did the government do about this discovery of organized corruption within DPWH? Apparently nothing; there is no record of any significant investigative or legal action being taken on the matter, and while Sen. Loren Legarda filed a resolution calling for an investigation in the Senate in early 2009, that seems to have come to naught as well. For Bonoan’s part, he was temporarily promoted to officer-in-charge of the DPWH between February and July 2007, filling in for Hermogenes Ebdane Jr., who served a short stint during that time as Defense Secretary. Bonoan eventually retired from DPWH in 2010, right about the time Rogelio Singson –now a member of the ICI – was named secretary by then-president Aquino, and went on to the private sector, until being recalled by President Marcos in 2022. Bonoan’s still-unanswered role in the NRIMP scandal in his previous stint at DPWH was evidently not considered important either by the president or the Commission on Appointments.

Unfortunately for Bonoan, his position at DPWH, both between 2000 and 2007 and from July 2022 until his resignation under a cloud of controversy in August of this year, requires that his guilt or innocence in either scandal be explicitly established. “Presumption of innocence” in the form of just ignoring the open questions is not good enough, especially not with public faith in the government deteriorating as rapidly as it is. Releasing the confidential version of World Bank’s 2007 report would be the right step. The government, however, appears increasingly reluctant to take right steps, so we shall see what happens.

ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
Bluesky: @benkritz.bsky.social

Movie Review: ‘Wicked: For Good’ is a complete mess

A couple of disclosures are probably necessary to put this review into some kind of context. First, even as a child I was never a fan of the “Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” the L. Frank Baum novel that was adapted into the immortal 1939 film starring Judy Garland. The story (in either book or movie form) was too simplistic, too shallow in its black-and-white moral lesson about good and evil even for 5- or 6-year-old me. What can I say, I was a precocious kid, and in kind of a troubling sort of way. Ask my mom.

Nevertheless, I’ve always respected the original works (book and movie) as important artifacts of human culture. You don’t have to like the Mona Lisa as a painting (it’s small, and kind of dull when you see it in person), but you have to acknowledge its bigger-than-life importance. Same goes for the Wizard of Oz; it’s that realization that helps one endure seeing the damn movie over and over and over and over again for a period of 5-6 months when one has toddlers in the house. Goddamn, am I glad my kids have grown.

Second, and I realize I am a bit of spoilsport with my attitude, but when it comes to films that are iconic pieces of culture – whether I enjoy them or not – I feel very strongly that they should be left well enough alone, and not be “reimagined” or otherwise redone by others who either lack imagination to come up with something original, or have only just enough imagination to realize they can cash in with something vaguely related to the iconic original. There are exceptions, but they are exceedingly rare. “Wicked: For Good” is not one of them.

The film is the second of two movies adapted from the hit Broadway musical “Wicked,” and the fact that they milked it for two movies when one would do (the original musical was two-and-a-half hours long, with a 15-20 minute intermission) tells you all you need to know about the creators’ real motives. And to be fair to them, it absolutely seems to be working; according to news reports, the movie made something like $226 million over its opening weekend, putting it on par with The Minecraft Movie in terms of popularity.

Sweet Jesus, send the goddamn meteor already.

The first installment of this awkward attempt at retconning the Wizard of Oz, 2024’s “Wicked,” was clumsy, a mule-footed antifascism sermon projected through a filter of CGI so heavy the whole thing felt like a peyote dream. But at least it ended, confusing as its message was: Elphaba (played by Cynthia Erivo) became the Wicked Witch of the West, giving the bumbling dictator The Wizard (played by Jeff Goldblum) and his public cheerleader, the vacuous Glinda (played by Ariana Grande) the villain the Wizard’s fearmongering authoritarian regime needed. So... that was good? Maybe? Who knows. But it was done, and collected its mountain of cash, and the world could move on.

However, director Jon M. Chu and screenwriters Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox said “hold all our beers,” and took everything that was cringe-inducing and overblown about the first film and dialed it up to 11 for this second one. As far as I could tell, apart from being a naked money grab, the main purpose of “Wicked: For Good” from a storytelling perspective was to fill a plot hole no one except people who still write on Tumblr would care about, tying the “reimagined origin story” of “Wicked” to the 1939 classic film. That happened about three-quarters of the way through “Wicked: For Good,” at which point I let out an involuntary groan and said, “Please don’t tell me we now have to sit through the entire Wizard of Oz, god, will this never end?”

Before that happened, however, the audience was treated to an assault on their sensibilities, through a plot of interpersonal drama that would put most soap operas to shame. Oz the World Turns. Glinda’s fiancé, the dashing Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), jilts her at the altar to run off with his crush, Elphaba; in her forest lair, fully consumed by jungle fever, he tells her he finds her beautiful because “he’s seeing things in a different way.” The origin stories of the source materials’ Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow are fleshed out in rather gruesome ways – without giving too much away, the Tin Man and Scarecrow are the results of the epidemic of love triangles happening, while the Cowardly Lion is a metaphor for, as near as I could tell, the old Southern ideal of the “happy slave.”

Bigotry and racism are in fact key elements of the story throughout. The Wizard’s regime regards animals, who are smart and can talk and do important jobs (i.e., just like non-white immigrants in America, or, if you really want to go there, Jews in Germany), with suspicion, and first marginalizes them, and then either seeks to imprison or drive them out. People with disabilities, represented by Elphaba’s wheelchair-bound sister Nessarose (played by Marissa Bode), she of the ruby slippers that the OG Dorothy ends up wearing, are bitter and helpless. The dictator of this goofy world, The Wizard, is a bumbling hick who stumbled into his position, but has great power at his disposal so everyone is careful to praise him (sound like anyone we know?), which is made all the more easy by the general population being a herd of dumb sheep. And of course, there is the real power behind the throne, the conniving, brilliantly evil Asian lady, who, just in case the caricature is too subtle, is given the name Madame Morrible; she is played by Michelle Yeoh, who, except perhaps for Goldblum, has more acting talent in her left tit than the rest of this cast has put together, though that is somewhat diminished by her costume featuring a hairstyle that looks like someone set off a grenade in it. One review I read over the weekend speculated that her character was named what she was because Crazy Witch Asian might have been rejected as too obvious.

Fun fact, one of Chu’s prior successes was the hit “Crazy Rich Asians.” Make of that what you will.

The overall impression of “Wicked: For Good” is that it is a film in which the creators were comprehensively trying too hard; trying too hard to make a political message, but not really landing on anything; trying too hard to make music that would sell copies of the soundtrack (while the entire cast, and especially Ms. Grande, are very good singers, the songs were tedious and forgettable); and trying too hard to make a visual extravaganza and instead presenting a film that is either over-exposed or under-exposed throughout, with CGI that looks a good ten years behind the state-of-the-art (what exactly did these people do with their $200 million budget, anyway?).

Finally, and this is something that shouldn’t really need to be brought up in a normal review, but is probably worth addressing because it’s already created a disturbing amount of buzz online: Ariana Grande’s physical appearance in the film is unsettling to say the least. From her visible emaciation, to lip fillers that make the women who hang out at Mar-a-Lago look understated, to her dead, shark-like eyes throughout most of the film – that at least seemed to look more normal later on, so it may have been deliberate, but if so, it was a terrible choice – she simply looks unwell. It’s worrisome, and from a creative standpoint, it’s not something the film’s creators would want as a distraction. Good or bad, they would want people to be talking about their movie, not how their star looks like she needs to see a doctor and eat a good meal as soon as possible.

I hope I’m wrong about this Epstein Files thing, but...

AT the risk of pissing a lot of people off, I’m just going to go ahead and say it: If you’re holding your breath in anticipation of the Epstein Files taking Trump down, you’re going to suffocate long before that ever happens, because it’s not going to happen.

First of all, it was absolutely the right thing to do for the House of Representatives to overwhelmingly vote for the discharge petition ordering the Justice Department to release all the Epstein Files, and it was an even better thing to do for the Senate to deem the bill passed without debate or a vote. However, that was an entirely pro forma exercise; we can take some comfort that it was done, because it would have been heartbreaking if were not, but it won’t mean anything.

The vote came, of course, only after Trump reversed his desperate attempts to keep it from happening at all costs, and said that his Republican cult members in Congress ought to go ahead and vote for the bill after all. It may be that was enough for some of his enablers to breathe a sigh of relief that they wouldn’t have to cross a horrible line and condone pedophilia and human trafficking, but for others it was undoubtedly simply a matter of doing what Trump told them to do, as is their usual practice. Doesn’t matter, really; the outcome was the same.

We can draw two conclusions from this. The first one is that Trump is so narcissistic that he cannot bear the thought of losing under any circumstances, even to the point of risking losing just to be able to say it was his idea, and the vote didn’t go against him. The second conclusion is that, even as defective as that shows Trump is, there are enough people who, while as equally evil as he is, are smarter and far less deranged, who have hung their fortunes onto his continued existence as president, and who would have absolutely not let the vote happen if there was not a fair degree of confidence that it could be thwarted another way.

Trump could veto the bill; that would surely be overturned...or would it? I’m not so sure; the line taken by Grindr Mike and the few others who obviously voted against their wishes, i.e., that the bill violates victims’ and others’ privacy in some ways seems to be laying the groundwork for second thoughts. It takes more to overturn a veto than it does to pass a bill in the first place, so that might be an opportunity to kill it, from the Trump regime’s point of view.

Another thing that has been widely mentioned is that the Department of Justice could simply refuse to comply, on the grounds that the files are part of an “ongoing investigation.” Personally, I think that is the more likely thing to happen; Trump and his cabal have had close to a year of being almost completely unchallenged in straight-up ignoring laws and court orders, there is no reason for them to think this time will be any different. Even if public outrage and Congressional annoyance somehow force the DOJ to comply eventually – which will almost certainly require getting the question past Trump’s servile Supreme Court – the delay will be long, long enough even for the crude solution of just running everything through the shredder.

I hope I’m wrong. I would like nothing better than to wake up one morning to a headline that announces Trump has resigned in shame, and is being held without bond on child rape and sex trafficking charges, among other things. Double bonus if he gets stabbed to death in the shower of the jail by some other piece of human garbage who has a big problem with kid-fuckers. None of that is going to happen, nor is anything even remotely close to it going to happen; this scandal is not going to stop Trump, or even slow him down, and the only way we’ll finally see an end to the global nightmare he represents is when he leaves the White House feet-first in a body bag. God willing, that happens soon. Unfortunately, I don’t believe in God.

As a final note, if you Americans on the continent are curious about how this drama is being played in the rest of the world, the sad answer is that it is not. I see a bit of brief news about it off the wires from some of the European media, particularly those who have a bit of an anti-Trump bent anyway, but otherwise not a word. Especially not here in Asia; it’s a non-existent story, and even if it was a story, it is highly unlikely anyone in this part of the world would even care. It’s not that they condone sexual perversion and abuse of minors, on the contrary, they’re very sensitive to that; it’s just that America is such a monolith that the fact that a vicious madman happens to be in charge at the moment is kind of incidental. Sad!

Everything is total garbage, but that’s because we let it be

A brief commentary, inspired by something I read yesterday in Addison Del Mastro’s Substack newsletter, “The Deleted Scenes.” You can find the original article here, and I’d recommend taking a browse through his other pieces; he writes about some interesting stuff.

This is actually my second attempt at this. I started a complementary commentary to Addison’s excellent piece last night, but it turned into a grumpy generational rant. I don’t want to go there, because that ultimately accomplishes nothing but contributing to social divisions. However, I had an experience today that I think adds something worth mulling over.

A week or so ago, my daughter and I made the alarming discovery that the bottom heating element on my oven had stopped functioning. I was truly mystified by this; it is a brand that is generally considered reliable, has only had occasional use in the slightly less than three years I’ve owned it, and – since I am by no means wealthy enough to be wasteful, or even anything that could be considered even remotely wealthy by anyone’s estimation – it has been kept clean and otherwise treated kindly, because durable goods are supposed to be, well, durable.

I was quite nonplussed by this development, suddenly seeing my extensive plans for holiday cooking and baking (I will have both the kids this Christmas season, though the jury is still out on whether that is a blessing or a curse) figuratively go up in smoke. The warranty has long expired, the information on factory service was altogether discouraging, and independent appliance repairmen are a thing of the distant past. So I had two choices: Either acquiesce in hauling the damn thing across town to the factory service center, pay a considerable fraction of its original price for diagnosis, and then wait several weeks for them to inform that I would have to replace it anyway; or crack it open, and see what I could do.

That’s not quite the long shot it might sound; in another life I was, among other things, a Level 8 automotive technician, so I am not intimidated by the relatively simple mechanics of a small electric oven. Working methodically as I was taught long ago, I got the outer shell off the oven, discovered a shorted-out connector, cleaned that up, tested to make sure the problem was resolved, then reassembled the oven and restored it to its place of honor in the kitchen, ready for duty. Cost: nothing but time, and a couple of minor scrapes on my knuckle from the edge of one of the sheet metal panels.

A little while later I was relating the story of this minor adventure to a friend of mine, who was surprised. “I had one of the other models of those ovens, it burned out after a couple of years, and I was told they’re basically non-repairable, except for replacing a light bulb or one of the knobs,” he said. “How did you do it?”

“I just did it,” I said. “I mean, I have basic mechanical skills.”

“Well, yeah, but they told me you can’t even really open it,” he insisted.

“It was kind of a pain in the ass, true,” I agreed. Which it was; the entire casing of the oven was three stamped and folded sheet metal panels kind of origami-ed together and held in place by several dozen short screws. Taking it apart wasn’t too difficult, but getting it back together required about half an hour of three-axis finagling and a lot of swear words. Not the worst repair job I’ve ever had, but certainly not the easiest, either.

As Addison Del Mastro puts it in his article, it’s hard to escape the feeling that things just don’t work anymore, and he implies that there’s no way to escape it. Drenching us with a constant stream of substandard garbage, whether it’s everyday products like light bulbs (we all know the story about the manufacturer’s cartel that decided to start making them shittier, so that customers would have to buy replacements more often), small appliances, our electronic gizmos, complex machines like automobiles, or even basic services and the quality of online content that bombards our brains like radiation, everything is just crap, enforced obsolescence designed to keep us constantly consuming goods. We get into the cycle when our things break, or our fast fashion clothing pops a seam, and then it becomes a rote habit. We buy a new smartphone every time the new model is introduced, because...we don’t know why, actually, we just do.

If I was a less patient (or less stubborn) person, and if I didn’t have a modicum of tinkering skill – in other words, if I was most people – I would have not thought twice before going to the appliance store, picking up a new oven, and using the box it came in to discard the old, nonfunctional one. All for the sake of a single compromised wire connector half the size of a fingernail that was literally restored to like-new condition by “unplug it, brush it off, and plug it back in again.”

For the sake of our own financial well-being and peace of mind, and for the sake of the environment that we are choking with ever-growing mountains of complex waste, we need to find a better way, and a way to change attitudes, particularly among the younger generation – here’s where that whole thing comes into the picture – who have never known anything other than the way things are, and have no context not to believe that it’s not only normal, but preferable.

As if on cue, just as I wrapped up my adventure in small appliance repair, I discovered the weekly Inside Climate News newsletter (written by @kileyprice.bsky.social) that featured an article about the small but gradually growing trend of “repair cafes,” where communities gather to do pretty much exactly what I just did – but in a way that passes along the knowledge and helps to change the toxic consumer mindset. This is the way: Breaking down the monolith of Big Tech Capitalism one tap of the chisel at a time. If such a thing exists in my area, or if someone would be inspired to start one, I would surely get in on it.

 

Typhoon Central

AS I sit down to write this, it is 6:48 PM local time on Sunday, November 9 here in the Philippines, and we are in the process of being lashed by a Category 4 typhoon. I live almost exactly in the geographic center of Metro Manila, and conditions here, with the typhoon still an hour or two from making landfall along the coast northeast of us, are unpleasant but not cataclysmic. The winds are blowing at about 35-40 knots, with sometimes stronger gusts, and the rain at the moment is steady but not torrential. We have, however, just received a “red” rainfall warning, which means rainfall of 30 mm (1.18 inches) per hour are expected over the next two hours.

This typhoon is called Typhoon Fung-Wong, which I understand means “phoenix mountain” or something in Chinese, but within the “Philippine Area of Responsibility,” which is a large polygon on the map encompassing the Philippines and Taiwan, it is known as Typhoon Uwan. That is one thing I’ve always appreciated about the way Philippine authorities deal with tropical storms and typhoons, the way they name them in alphabetical order. This is the 21st storm of the year, so it is Uwan, a Tagalog word that I understand means “uwan.”

This is the second destructive typhoon to hit the country in less than a week; earlier in the week Typhoon Tino (called Kalmaegi elsewhere) ripped across the central part of the country, killing at least 224 people (the official count as of earlier today), with more than 100 still missing. That storm dumped an entire month’s worth of rain in about 7 hours, leading to catastrophic flooding. There are very few reports yet about damage from the present storm, but it is likely to be serious. As one indication of that, the most recent update from the national grid operator said that there was a total of 29 of its transmission lines that were out of service, and that’s without the storm having made landfall yet. During last week’s typhoon, the largest number of downed lines, after the typhoon had passed and across a much wider area, was 19.

Schools and government offices have already been closed for the next two days here in Metro Manila, and while the authorities have seemed to be a bit over-cautious about that this year, there will indeed be some flooding. Metro Manila is one of the most congested cities (actually a collection of 17 individual cities) on Earth, it is poorly designed, and the drainage system is shit. Flooding has become steadily more frequent and more serious with each passing year, as much of the city is sinking due to groundwater extraction and unchecked development.

Climate change is probably worsening that problem, but it is difficult to quantify that as of now. It won’t be, in the not too distant future. Likewise, there is a common belief that climate change is making these storms worse – more frequent, more intense, or both. The relatively new science of weather attribution has created models that tend to support that belief, but again, it’s difficult to put your finger on it. We don’t often get to the letter U in the yearly alphabet of storm names, but it’s not unheard of; the weather doesn’t behave in orderly trends, so discerning a pattern even over 20 years, the amount of time I’ve been here, is impossible. But it won’t be, in the not too distant future.

These back-to-back destructive typhoons have happened at a time when the Philippines is grappling with a large-scale corruption scandal involving public works projects; the focus the past couple of months has been on flood-control projects, although just about every public works project done in the past couple of decades – roads, bridges, health care facilities, school buildings – has been tainted by a well-organized and widespread system of graft involving public works officials, local government officials, members of Congress, and contractors. There has been a lot of finger-pointing in the past few days, and there will be more in the days to come, and where it will all lead is anyone’s guess. There have been other huge scandals in the past that should have brought down the government, or seen some of the country’s ruling class hauled off to prison, but that has never happened; despite the volume of rhetoric and the show of investigating the evildoers this time around, there is nothing really to suggest this time is going to be any different.

And I think I know why, and this storm lashing the big window in front of my desk is the clue. I live on the 18th floor of a well-built building in a decent neighborhood, and have a comfortable existence – I am not wealthy by my or anyone else’s standards, because I am a journalist after all, but I do okay. This storm may be a modest inconvenience to me at best, and realistically, if it is, it will probably only be because the suspension of government offices the next two days holds up some work I have to do. The most serious repercussion we are likely to experience in this household is my college student daughter being pissed off and grumpy that classes are suspended.

That is obviously not the case for a vast number of Filipinos. 30 percent or more of Metro Manila’s inhabitants – 4 to 5 million people – live in slums. They euphemistically refer to them as “informal settlements” to try to dignify them a bit, but slums are what they are, and some of them are the worst you can imagine. There is a similar proportion in every urban area of any size everywhere else in the country as well. These are the people who overwhelmingly suffer the consequences of typhoons and flooding. Most of the dead from Typhoon Tino in and around the central city of Cebu earlier in the week were from the hive-like shantytowns crowding the banks of rivers, which were literally scrubbed off the face of the Earth by the floods the typhoon caused.

These are the faceless millions, unseen in life or death, with no power to hold anyone to account. Those who are better-off may express outrage over things like “Floodgate” on moral grounds, but the people whose lives are actually at risk are silent, and furthermore, are kept that way by politicians who treat them as pets, at best. Nothing will come of the current “probes” into the flood-control corruption scandal, save for a few scapegoats who will be sacrificed to draw attention away from the real culprits.

If the floods would come to a neighborhood of a little higher economic status, things would be different, and we know this because it’s happened once. Back in 2009, torrential rains from a tropical depression – it wasn’t even a tropical storm at that point – called Ondoy caused catastrophic flooding across Metro Manila. In the city of Marikina, a village called Provident Village – a nice place, probably best described as upper middle-class – lying in a bend of the Marikina River was pounded by a flash flood, worsened by immense amounts of garbage clogging drainage systems. Many people died; a guy I know casually lost his elderly father.

Things began to change rapidly after that. The City of Marikina improved its flood warning system, and invested heavily in civil works and drainage improvements to try to prevent another catastrophe. Marikina is unfortunately very flood-prone, so it has not escaped trouble in the years since, but a good emergency management system, better solid waste management system, and its investments in flood-control infrastructure do a lot to minimize harm.

Unfortunately, that’s what it’s going to take to provoke real reform in this country, whether it’s the specific issue of flood-control and other public works projects being compromised by corruption, or the larger issue of dealing with climate change. Hurt the people who matter, put them and their property and businesses in harm’s way, and they’re going to demand something be done, beginning with punishing those who betrayed them.

That’s really sad, but that is the world as we know it.