Dammed transparency

Every wet season, parts of Capiz go under more or less on schedule. Provincial Administrator Arthur John Biñas puts it plainly: in the second district, seven of 10 towns flood two to three times a year; in the first district, all six towns and Roxas City take the water.

A Philippine Institute for Development Studies  (PIDS) survey recently caught the pattern in a number — 8.7% of rural households hit by flooding, more than double the regional average. Nobody in Capiz needed a survey to know that.

So when the Panay River Basin Integrated Development Project finally starts to look real, the instinct is to cheer, and I share it. The project promises to shield roughly 26,800 hectares of farmland and benefit some 25,046 farmers, and to put a dam between the river and the towns it keeps drowning. After a decade of feasibility studies, “at least it can finally begin,” as Biñas said. Fair enough.

But here is the complication: the country is in the middle of its ugliest flood-control scandal in memory. Of the PHP 545 billion spent on flood control from July 2022 to May 2025, the President himself flagged that PHP 100 billion went to just 15 contractors. Senators have since put a figure on the ghost projects — around PHP 180 billion lost to flood works that were fully paid for and never built. Finance officials estimate the economy lost between PHP 42.3 billion and PHP 118.5 billion to those scams from 2023 to 2025.

Now read the PRBIDP figures again in that light. Estimated at PHP 20.786 billion back in 2017, and openly expected to swell. NIA-6 is lobbying for PHP 6.5 billion in 2027 alone to start civil works, on top of the initial PHP 4.5 billion President Marcos has committed. It will be built design-and-build — one contractor responsible for both the design and the construction. None of that makes PRBIDP dirty. It does make it large, fast-tracked, and arriving at the exact moment Filipinos have learned, in detail, how flood money vanishes. That a region carrying more than its share of the country’s disasters still has to lobby, year by year, for the money to defend itself is its own kind of scandal.

Which is the case for building the guardrails before the groundbreaking, not after. Who recalculates the new cost, and against what 2017 baseline? Will the contracts, variation orders, and progress billings be public from day one? Is there an independent monitor — provincial, civil society, anyone outside the agency cutting the checks — with standing to walk the site? These aren’t hostile questions. They are the cheapest insurance Capiz can buy.

Because the survey behind that 8.7% won’t run again for four years. Farmers don’t get that luxury; they replant every season, flood or no flood. The most respectful thing the province can do with their patience is make sure the billions meant to protect them actually reach the river — and that someone is counting, in pesos and in poured concrete, the whole way down.

If PRBIDP turns out to be the project that proves clean flood control is possible here, that’s worth more than the dam itself. If it becomes another line in next year’s hearings, the floodwater will be the least of it.