Hunting ghosts from orbit

So now we have satellites watching the dikes. The Philippine Space Agency told the Space Council on June 2 that it has been handing imagery to the Office of the Ombudsman to help sort out which flood control projects were actually built and which exist only on paper. On its face, this is good. A contractor can argue with an auditor but it is much harder to argue with a photograph of an empty riverbank where a structure the public paid PHP 100 million for was supposed to stand.

And the scale of what needs checking is hard to take in. Of roughly 10,000 flood control projects inspected from 2016 to 2025, public works officials flagged 421 as “ghost” works — paid in full, physically absent. Senator Panfilo Lacson pegged the losses from non-existent projects at around PHP 180 billion, and that does not even count the substandard ones still standing in the rain. Investigators say lawmakers and their handpicked engineers skimmed 30 to 40 percent off the top. The Anti-Money Laundering Council has frozen some PHP 20.3 billion in assets. Against numbers like those, an extra set of eyes — even ones orbiting hundreds of kilometers up — sounds like a bargain.

Imagery is the easy part but the constant question is “so what?” A satellite can prove a project is a ghost. But it cannot file the case, subpoena a district engineer, follow the money, or persuade a witness to talk. Imagery is evidence, not justice. We have never really had a data problem in this country. We have a prosecution problem — and the temptation now is to let a shiny tool stand in for the slow, unglamorous work of indicting powerful people. So there is really only one question worth putting to PhilSA and the Ombudsman: how many anomalies has the imagery flagged, and how many have become cases? Until somebody answers that, this is a capability, not a result.

There is a longer game here too, and it is worth defending. MULA — a USD 34-million satellite now finishing tests in the United Kingdom, due to launch in April 2027 — is meant to be the first of a homegrown constellation. That is a real bet on owning our own eyes instead of renting foreign ones, and it deserves to succeed. Except “national priority” is the kind of thing officials say all the time. Whether the constellation actually gets built depends on what survives the appropriations process.

Then bring it home. More than PHP 2.2 billion in flood projects are underway in Iloilo City alone, nearly PHP 901 million of it with firms tied to the Discaya family — contractors who, as Frank Drilon likes to point out, were nowhere near Iloilo before 2017. Meanwhile 14 towns in the province, among them Balasan, Batad, Carles, and Sara, got no flood works at all since 2022. Sara declared a calamity that year when 34 barangays went under and more than 6,000 people were displaced.

Those residents did not need a satellite to know the dike was never built. They have been the monitoring system all along — waist-deep, every habagat. So point the cameras down. Then send the prosecutors in.