By Atty. Howie Calleja
Imagine your motorbike jamming in an EDSA pothole that’s lingered since 2020, or your kid’s Quezon City classroom flooding because a promised drainage project was siphoned for profit. These daily miseries trace back to a clear starting line: 2016, the start of the Duterte administration. That’s the year whistleblowers (the brave “discaya” who spoke up) say infrastructure corruption turned from a quiet racket into a full-blown heist—one that exploded even during the pandemic, when your tita’s sari-sari store closed and frontliners begged for masks. The companies tied to this graft grew “in leaps and bounds” while we scraped by, and every link in the infrastructure chain was in on it: bureaucrats, contractors, everyone.
The recent suspect list is being hailed as a sign the “wheels of justice are moving,” but they’re crawling— and missing the core of the problem: the Duterte-era roots that let this rot spread. Any investigation that does not include Duterte 2016 onwards is incomplete, a half-measure that will fail to untangle the systemic graft that took hold during those years and left ordinary Filipinos bearing the cost. The Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI)—the Philippines’ 2025 ad hoc fact-finding body tasked with probing 2015-onward infrastructure projects—must anchor its work firmly in this era to deliver real accountability, starting with a full, no-holds-barred audit of the ₱51 billion in Duterte-era projects tied to Cong. Paolo Duterte. That sum is enough to fix every flood-prone school in Metro Manila and fund new hospitals for frontliners, and we deserve to know exactly where that money went and who benefited from its mismanagement.
The ICI also cannot shy away from summoning Sen. Bong Go and his family’s construction company, whose string of Duterte-era contract wins has long raised red flags about unfair access to government projects. These ties to power cannot be brushed aside as coincidental; they are part of the web of corruption that thrived when checks and balances were sidelined during the Duterte administration. Similarly, the ICI must target contractor-politicians who exploited their Duterte-era lawmaking roles to snap up lucrative government projects, turning their public offices into personal profit-making tools. This dual role created an inherent conflict of interest that allowed graft to flourish unchecked, and it demands thorough scrutiny—within the ICI’s legal authority to issue subpoenas and recommend DOJ/Ombudsman complaints.
Finally, the ICI must push for the immediate extradition of Zaldy Co, a fugitive already named in two ICI interim reports (including a October 2025 plunder recommendation) whose Duterte-era ties could unlock critical evidence about cross-border stolen funds. His return would not only help recover looted money but also send a clear message that no one—even those who flee the country—can escape accountability for their role in the 2016-era heist. Critics will call this focus on the Duterte era political, but what’s political about demanding answers for money stolen from our kids’ schools and our frontliners’ safety? Every day the ICI delays centering this era in its investigations, more funds vanish, and more powerful people get the message: “You can steal from us and get away with it.” That initial suspect list is a start—but only if the ICI stops avoiding the Duterte-era origin story that made this crisis possible. Without that, we’ll be stuck with the same potholes, flooded classrooms, and stolen promises for another decade.
When the next typhoon swells the Pasig River and floods the homes of Quezon City families who waited years for a broken flood control project, or when a student misses a final exam because their jeepney got stuck in an unpatched EDSA pothole, those moments won’t be blamed on “slow justice”—they’ll be blamed on a choice to look away from the 2016-era graft that created those crises. To fix what’s broken, the ICI must stop treating the Duterte-era heist as a footnote and start treating it as the linchpin of its work; anything less is a betrayal of the millions of Filipinos who’ve already paid for this corruption with their livelihoods, their safety, and their hope for a better future.