By Robert B. Roque, Jr.
She has long passed, but former Environment Secretary Gina Lopez and the convictions she stood for are reentering our consciousness as the nation reels from earthquakes, floods, and landslides that continue to test the limits of our resilience.
It’s unfortunate that her appointment was not made permanent at the time. Lopez’s rejection by the Commission on Appointments symbolized how short-term profit and political protection of selfish business interests are the true obstacles in attaining long-term sustainability and public safety.
Clearly, she understood that protecting the environment was never just about trees, rivers, or mountains; it was about ensuring disaster-proofing for generations to come. She knew a determined stance on governance and accountability was necessary for the survival of communities.
Bringing what she stood for back in today’s discussion magnifies how the problem she sought to solve continues to manifest in every disaster. Cebu, following its devastation from earthquakes and typhoons recently, could be just the specimen for the failures.
From unregulated quarrying and reclamation in Cebu to watershed degradation in Negros, the devastation shows that ignoring proper land use and watershed management multiplies human and economic losses.
While these are some realizations that come to the fore, none of them diminish the accountability of those in power who chose convenience and profit over foresight and protection. For what has become painfully clear is that corruption bleeds into the soil as much as the rain does.
Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) Secretary Vince Dizon himself said it: that several flood control structures in Cebu had failed during the recent typhoon. And this was not so much that nature was too strong, but because planning and execution were too weak, even criminally so.
Contractors, some politicians, and a few in the DPWH, over the course of the past two administrations, have turned flood control into a racket. While investigations into them have intensified, the most obvious culprits unmasked, identified, and fleeing, no one has really been brought to fully account for the crimes just yet.
Some say the wrath of nature — or even God — has haunted government and its leaders, exposing through these chilling disasters what politically charged investigative hearings cannot: more of the ghost projects, more of the endless cycle of substandard dikes, nonexistent drainage, and recycled budgets in public works. Because there lies the unmistakable pattern of corruption.
It’s as if nature is waiting for comeuppance, because all that’s been accomplished really is just change ombudsmen, expose SALNs, protect the worst batch of probable state witnesses this country has ever seen, and maybe a rigodon of executive officials and high posts in Congress that serve no true measure of justice than political jockeying for 2028.
Meanwhile, Sen. Panfilo “Ping” Lacson vows to drag this rot into the sunlight. As he reclaims the chairmanship of the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee, he plans to summon former Speaker Martin Romualdez and 17 sitting lawmakers implicated by contractors in the ghost projects scandal. Perhaps then, accountability will finally flow where floodwaters have long gone — everywhere, and without mercy.
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