EDITORIAL: Captured State

THE unfolding revelations in the Philippine flood control program, as exposed by Leonardo Lanzona Jr. of the Cebu Daily News, are not merely stories of individual greed or bureaucratic negligence. They reveal something far more dangerous and corrosive: the systematic capture of the Philippine state by entrenched political and economic networks.

We are not dealing here with garden-variety corruption. This is state capture in its purest form—where public institutions, laws, and processes are deliberately reengineered to funnel public wealth into private hands, at the expense of the very communities they are meant to protect.

The figures are staggering. As much as 70% of the flood control budget—over $2 billion in just three years—has reportedly disappeared into corrupt schemes. Meanwhile, Filipino families are left defenseless against the floods that decent infrastructure could have prevented. This is not just theft—it is betrayal with lethal consequences.

Testimonies from engineers like Brice Ericson Hernandez and Jaypee Mendoza paint a damning picture: projects deliberately designed to be substandard, procurement processes rigged to favor cronies, oversight agencies weakened or co-opted. Specifications were manipulated, not through negligence, but by design. The goal was not to protect the public but to maximize “savings” that could be siphoned off to political patrons.

This was not done in a vacuum. It was done in a political arena where survival often depends on joining the racket. In such an environment, corruption isn’t just tolerated—it is rewarded. Being honest becomes dangerous, even suicidal.

When corruption becomes the system itself, when watchdogs are tamed and whistleblowers punished, what hope remains?

This is the essence of state capture, and it must be understood for what it is: not the failure of government, but its hijacking. This isn’t a case of bad actors exploiting loopholes. It is about designing the loopholes—rewriting rules, co-opting oversight, and ensuring that plunder becomes not the exception but the norm.

In a functioning democracy, such a colossal theft would trigger alarm across all sectors. Auditors would flag the discrepancies. Inspectors would halt substandard projects. Opposition lawmakers would demand accountability. Journalists would investigate and report. Citizens would mobilize.

Instead, every safeguard was either neutralized, compromised, or bought off. Auditors who spoke up lost their posts. Lawmakers implicated in the schemes used inquiries for damage control. Investigative journalists risked harassment or worse. Civil society and media must play a stronger role—but let us not be naïve. State capture works precisely by weakening or co-opting these institutions. That is why sustained independence is so difficult to maintain.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen this before. The Napoles pork barrel scam shocked the nation with its brazenness. But after the noise faded, the same networks endured—only more cautious, more encrypted, more entrenched. We cannot allow that to happen again.

This scandal, however, may be different. The evidence is unusually credible and detailed. The losses are immense. And the consequences—flooded homes, destroyed livelihoods, lost lives—are too personal for too many people to ignore.

When people realize that corruption is not some abstract policy failure but the reason their barangay floods every rainy season, outrage becomes visceral. That kind of anger is much harder to pacify with token reforms.

But this is a fleeting opportunity. Without sustained effort, this too will become just another cycle of anger, resignation, and forgetfulness.

To break that cycle, reform must be structural and far-reaching: Shield oversight bodies from political interference; Enforce true procurement transparency; Reduce the political resources available for patronage, and Empower civil society to hold government to account

Above all, we must flip the incentives: make corruption costly and public service viable. Until honest work becomes the path to professional survival—and corruption becomes the fast track to disgrace and ruin—nothing will fundamentally change.

The flood control scandal is both crisis and opportunity.

The crisis is obvious: a disaster-prone country robbed of the very infrastructure meant to protect its people. But the opportunity lies in this moment of clarity—a rare and brutal exposure of how deeply state capture runs. The scale of this theft has stripped away the excuses, the euphemisms, and the illusions.

What we do now will determine whether this moment sparks real transformation, or becomes just another entry in our long ledger of scandals.

We cannot afford the latter.