Pork by proxy

Drive through Iloilo or Aklan on any given afternoon, and you will see them — the gleaming, half-empty covered courts standing like monuments to political survival. We are staring down a proposed PHP 16.9 billion infrastructure budget for Western Visayas in 2027, and the ghosts of the pork barrel system are alive, well, and freshly painted.

Under the Basic Infrastructure Program (BIP), a staggering PHP 1.88 billion is earmarked strictly for multipurpose buildings and social facilities. This is the covered court cartel at work. The unwritten rule guaranteeing a PHP 150 million minimum for congressional districts bypasses actual engineering needs, substituting genuine regional resilience for politically visible concrete. Look at the districts led by House heavyweights — they are swimming in BIP funds.

Then look at Antique: the Antique District Engineering Office is the only one in the region with absolutely zero proposed BIP projects. It does not take a seasoned political analyst to connect the dots to Rep. AA Legarda’s complex voting history on the vice-presidential impeachment efforts. It is a masterclass in political blackmail. When public funds are weaponized for political reward and retaliation, it isn’t the congressman who suffers. It is the farmer in Tibiao who cannot get his produce to market because an access road was held hostage by a gavel in Manila.

But the covered courts are just the appetizer. The main course is water.

Flood control eats up PHP 6.070 billion — more than a third of the region’s entire infrastructure pie. Given the national scrutiny over substandard mitigation works and outright phantom projects, we need to ask exactly what we are buying. Take the PHP 688.930 million allocated for the Lamunan River project. Without fierce, localized tracking by civil society from the bidding phase to the final pour of cement, these massive allocations have a tragic habit of washing away with the first monsoon. There is a historical, maddening disconnect between massive flood control spending and actual dry floors in our urban centers.

Even if the money is spent honestly, it is being spent blindly. We are pouring billions into an outdated, reactive approach to climate resilience. The budget leans heavily into traditional revetment walls and seawalls — like the Buntatala Creek project and the PHP 1.2 billion shoreline protection program spanning Oton, Guimbal, and Miagao.

Walls will not save us. Continuously pouring concrete along our coasts while ignoring upstream deforestation and the collapse of urban drainage networks is ecologically and financially suicidal. We are treating the symptom while the disease rots the foundation. We desperately need a shift toward nature-based solutions and comprehensive basin management. Meanwhile, the region’s actual, dedicated disaster resilience initiative gets a pitiful PHP 180 million.

The priorities are hidden in plain sight. We are building roofs for voters to gather under, and walls to hold back a sea we refuse to understand.