Dr. Jose Antonio "Ka Pep" Goitia examines President Marcos' inspections of ghost flood control projects in Bulacan and Oriental Mindoro, arguing that real leadership combines inspection, correction, and aid.
Anger as a Starting Point, Not an Endpoint
When President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. inspected a riverwall project in Barangay Piel, Baliuag, Bulacan, the records in front of him said the work was finished. A 220-meter flood control project, ₱55 million spent, marked complete. What Marcos found on the ground told a different story. No visible construction. No evidence of labor. A project that existed on paper and nowhere else.
Marcos did not hide his reaction. He described himself as not merely disappointed but “very angry,” both at the deception itself and at the ongoing flooding problems that a properly completed project could have helped prevent. For Dr. Jose Antonio “Ka Pep” Goitia, that anger, paired with what followed it, is the part of the story worth paying attention to.
A Pattern, Not an Isolated Case
The Bulacan discovery did not stand alone. Goitia pointed to a parallel case in Oriental Mindoro, where Governor Humerlito “Bonz” Dolor had publicly revealed damaged dikes that collapsed just weeks after their supposed completion, alongside allegations of misused funds exceeding ₱39 billion tied to flood control projects in the province. Dolor appealed directly to Marcos for accountability against the contractors and officials responsible.
Taken together, these cases are consistent with the broader flood control corruption scandal that has dominated Philippine political discourse since 2024, involving ghost projects, inflated contracts, and a concentration of public works spending among a small number of contractors. What distinguishes the Bulacan and Oriental Mindoro cases in Goitia’s account is not their existence, since by this point the scale of the broader scandal is well documented, but the nature of the response they received.
Inspection, Correction, and Aid Together
“The President’s approach combines inspection, swift corrective action, and anti-corruption measures with tangible aid,” Goitia said. This is a specific claim about the sequence and completeness of the response, not merely its existence. Marcos did not simply express anger and move on. In Oriental Mindoro, Goitia noted, the administration released ₱46.14 million in direct assistance to farmers and fishers affected by the storms that the failed flood infrastructure was supposed to mitigate. Agencies were instructed to revise the Flood Control Masterplan to make it more climate-resilient and data-informed going forward.
“This is what leadership looks like,” Goitia said of the combination. The formulation is worth taking seriously as a standard rather than a slogan. Leadership, in this framing, is not measured solely by the willingness to express outrage when corruption is discovered. It is measured by whether that outrage translates into a complete response: identifying the failure, correcting the immediate harm to affected communities, and addressing the structural weaknesses that allowed the failure to occur in the first place.
The Harder Question Beneath the Inspections
Goitia’s support for the inspections does not treat them as a solved problem. The scale of the broader flood control scandal, hundreds of billions of pesos in question, hundreds of flagged or confirmed ghost projects nationwide, and an ongoing Independent Commission for Infrastructure investigation, is evidence of a systemic failure that individual site inspections, however well-executed, cannot fully address on their own.
What the inspections demonstrate, in Goitia’s reading, is a governing posture willing to confront uncomfortable findings directly rather than managing them for optics. A president who visits a flood control site expecting to find a completed project, discovers instead that nothing was built, and responds with visible anger followed by concrete corrective measures is modeling the kind of accountability that the broader scandal has made the public hungry for. Whether that posture is sustained systematically across the thousands of other flagged projects still under review is the test that will determine whether these individual inspections amount to genuine reform or remain isolated, if welcome, examples.
What Accountability Requires Going Forward
Goitia’s framing offers a standard against which the rest of the flood control investigation can be measured. Inspection alone is not enough if it is not paired with correction. Correction alone is not enough if the affected communities are left to absorb the cost without support. And neither is enough if the structural failures, in procurement, in oversight, in contractor accountability, that allowed ghost projects to be marked complete in official records are not addressed at the level of the system rather than the individual site.
The Bulacan and Oriental Mindoro cases, in this light, are not simply stories about two flood control projects. They are a test of whether the anger a president displays at a single site translates into the sustained institutional reform the broader scandal demands. That test, unlike the inspections themselves, is still ongoing.