Corruption, impunity, resilience

With 25 days before 2026, remember 2025 in three words — corruption, impunity, resilience - CIR.

- TONY LOPEZ

The first two words should make your blood boil. The third word should warm the cockles of your heart, important, amid our celebration of the world’s longest Christmas season.

President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. himself exposed history’s largest act of corruption — the looting, of P1.7-trillion flood control funds in the last 10 years, including the biggest chunk of it, P1 trillion, lost during the first three years of the current presidency.

The names implicated so far read like the who's who in the totem pole of the ruling political class and the government's engineering elite. Today, those who have been implicated are the gods of bad governance and the icons for everything that is wrong and mismanaged in this country.

Among the accused and implicated in the largest and most shameless act of corruption ever: Former Senate president Francis “Chiz” Escudero (ousted as SP Sept. 8, 2025), former House speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez (resigned Sept. 16, 2025), former House appropriations committee chair Elizaldy “Zaldy” Co (resigned as party-list congressman Sept. 29, 2025), Senators Jinggoy Estrada, Joel Villanueva and Mark Villar; former senators Bong Revilla and Nancy Binay.

From the government's engineering class, among those implicated are top officials of the Department of Public Works and Highways - ousted secretary Manuel Bonoan, undersecretaries Roberto Bernardo and Maria Catalina Cabral, Region IV-B (Mimaropa) regional Gerald Pacanan, district engineers Henry Alcantara of Bulacan and Rodrigo Larete of Davao Occidental.