FIRST, we got hit by a double whammy of Covid-19 and Pharmally. Second, we reel from the spillover ravages of the Iran war after waking up to find flood control grafters had robbed us of our taxes. Both pairs of calamities sank the economy to new lows that left everyone worse off, especially the poor. All disasters, to hardly anyone’s surprise, are man-made.
The global menace of Covid-19 (2019–2022) was not only a public health emergency. As the world bled, with around 67,000 recorded deaths in the Philippines alone, vultures struck. Some barangay officials hijacked millions worth of relief packages intended for their constituents, health facilities submitted fraudulent records to claim government subsidies and the well-connected, like goshawks and jackals beside a honey badger, took advantage of the chaos to loot.
It was the perfect pretext for the Rodrigo Duterte government (2016–2022) to fleece the treasury out of billions through a series of obscenely irregular procurement of Covid-19 supplies. Public procurement during emergencies justifies speed over process. Emergency procurement skips key steps required under a standard procurement process, at the expense of fairness and transparency.
The case of Pharmally, incorporated in 2019 with a paid-up capital of P625,000, is a study of how a president betrayed public trust and how spineless senators are exposed. The company bagged Procurement Service-Department of Budget and Management (PS-DBM) contracts worth over P11.5 billion for Covid-19 supplies that were eventually found to be substandard and grossly overpriced. The anomaly was a crucial footnote to why the government’s Covid response was deemed a dismal failure.
The plot involved an irregular transfer of at least P40 billion of Department of Health funds to PS-DBM, the relocation of Christopher Lao, who approved the Pharmally contracts, from the Office of the President to PS-DBM at the time when lots of Covid procurement for goods were being drawn up, the president’s directive to members of the Cabinet not to attend a senator Richard Gordon-led Blue Ribbon Committee investigation of the Pharmally scandal, and at least eight senators (Juan Miguel Zubiri, Bong Go, Cynthia Villar, Bato Dela Rosa, Imee Marcos, Francis Tolentino, Bong Revilla and Pia Cayetano) opting not to sign the committee report.
The report also pointed out the role of Duterte’s economic adviser, Michael Yang, who brokered the Covid purchases. On separate occasions, Yang also became a key figure in congressional probes of alleged human trafficking violations committed by Philippine offshore gaming operators that prompted the two-time Duterte spokesman Harry Roque to flee to evade arrest. Moreover, Yang was a central figure in the House investigation of Duterte’s war on drugs, in which the latter was found to be the power behind transforming the drug war agencies into one big criminal enterprise.
The caricature of a government being transformed into an organized crime syndicate reappears with the Blue Ribbon Committee investigation — this time chaired by Sen. Ping Lacson — of the flood control scandal. The whole-of-government approach to looting, involving members of Congress, executive (including local government) officials and some elements of the judiciary, had dismayed taxpayers since the jueteng scandal during the aborted Joseph Estrada presidency. It reclaimed notoriety with a confession: President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. named in his last State of the Nation Address (SONA) 15 dubious flood control contractors and asked them to have shame and repent. It took courage for the president to accept a self-inflicted reputational damage, owning as he did the lack of moral energy displayed by his subordinates, although one cannot discount the sting of a stirring note passed around by former Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines president Ambo David. Days before Marcos delivered his SONA in July 2025, the Archbishop of Kalookan issued a pastoral letter decrying the deaths in his diocese caused by leptospirosis and the perennial flooding that led to it. He also rued the pattern of corruption that explained the government’s failure to address issues like flooding.
The immediate adverse impact on people’s lives of both Pharmally and flood control corruption controversies is unquantifiable. The gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate plunged to its lowest in decades at negative 17 percent in 2020, and to 2.8 percent, also a new low, six years later. The extent to which both Covid-19 and the Iran war actually contributed to the morose economy is yet unclear. But the misdeeds, alleged or not, are telling. They claimed lives, and the poor, already struggling to get by, are further exposed to a wide range of vulnerabilities, mainly due to rising costs of basic commodities.
Disasters in pairs clobbered us, and we are still bracing for the full impact of inflation, where families which used to live on P150 a day will now be hard-pressed to live on a hundred pesos a day; surging power bills; and a climate change-induced El Niño.
This is a time to double down on action and reflection. A time to think twice about who deserves our vote, which will be due in two years. As in 2025, when the flood control-induced lumps of the national budget showed symptoms of cancerous greed, the next election year budget can expand to record bulges, fueling another upsurge in public spending, in large part funded by public debt that has risen to scary levels.
haberia@gmail.com