Davao City was once again hit by widespread flooding at the start of the week, as heavy rain turned streets in several areas into waterways and exposed the Southern Mindanao city’s continuing vulnerability to extreme weather conditions.

On Tuesday morning, May 19, the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration warned that Davao City would remain under cloudy skies with thunderstorms, and that floods and landslides were still possible amid unstable weather conditions.

By then, however, the impacts had already been felt.

Davao-based Mindanews reported that late Monday evening, May 18, residents in Agdao were seen struggling through waist-deep floodwaters as the easterlies brought sustained rainfall over the city.

According to the report, the flooding did not peak immediately but gradually worsened over time, eventually submerging parts of the community and isolating several low-lying areas as continuous rain fell through the night.

As a result, city hall ordered the suspension of classes and government work as flooding spread.

Separately, GMA News reported the collapse of a bridge linking Callawa and Mandug after hours of sustained rainfall on Monday. This is another piece of infrastructure that gave way under conditions that, in this part of the world, are no longer exactly unforeseen.

It also reported that in Barangay Matina Pangi, hundreds of families were forced to evacuate after a river swelled to critical levels and spilled over its banks.

On Tuesday, the following day, in Manila, ACT Teachers Representative Antonio Tinio called for an investigation by the Office of Ombudsman into what he alleged were Davao City’s P4.4 billion anomalous flood control projects. He said nearly half of the questioned projects were inserted into the budget for Davao’s 1st District.

That allegation, as expected, was swiftly met not with a point-by-point rebuttal, but with a familiar counter-script from the district’s representative, Paolo Duterte. 

What quickly followed was a statement, which was less a defense, the kind the Duterte politics has refined into an art form, where outrage is deployed not to clarify but to obscure.

Strip the issue of all the noise, and it is simple: flooding and possible irregularities in Davao flood control projects. In any serious setting, that would invite equally straightforward answers: contracts, procurement records, engineering studies, audit findings, and, if nothing else, a coherent explanation for why a city where billions of pesos were poured into flood control still routinely turns into something resembling a waterlogged basin every time the rain intensifies.

But, instead of answers, we are handed a detour by Pulong to Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Martin Romualdez, Sandro Marcos, national corruption, ACT Teachers, trolls, and “selective outrage.”

Everything except the actual question.

It is an old trick in the book to respond with an appearance or air of righteous indignation against corruption in government, in this case the present administration, when one feels he is being alluded to as a suspect in the misuse of public funds.

But that is not an answer. It is a deflection. It does not refute anything. It only changes the subject and increases the volume while doing so.

Pulong asked, “Why is he (Tinio) not filing complaints against the engineers, contractors, and political personalities linked to questionable flood control projects nationwide?” 

Very well. But the question turns back on Pulong.

Why didn’t you? Why did Pulong not?

Then came the fiction that Davao City is being singled out as a uniquely persecuted entity, unfairly targeted while other flood-control projects supposedly escape scrutiny. This collapses immediately upon contact with reality. Congress, state auditors, investigative journalists, and civic groups have been looking into questionable flood control spending across the country for some time now. There is nothing novel or exceptional about scrutiny here. The only novelty is the claim that scrutiny itself is persecution.

From there, Pulong’s argument descended into something almost childlike in its logic and that is, billions were spent in Davao from 2020 to 2022. So? Did he mean that corruption could not have happened in Davao because of that? 

(The late Cathy Cabral, then public works undersecretary, confirmed to a House committee in September 2025 that the eldest son of ex-president Rodrigo Duterte received some P51 billion in infrastructure projects during the last three years of his father’s presidency. By December, just days before Christmas, Cabral was found dead in Benguet.)

It is as if corruption were somehow allergic to concrete. Yet a road being built proves nothing about how it was built. A bridge standing upright does not certify the integrity of its budget. A drainage system functioning on paper does not eliminate the possibility of overpricing, kickbacks, favored contractors, ghost components, or substandard execution. 

In fact, history suggests exactly the opposite — that corruption often prefers the aesthetics of completion. It thrives on ribbon-cuttings, smiles for the camera, and oversized project tarpaulins declaring success over work that taxpayers will eventually discover was anything but.

There was the Pulong Duterte invocation of “P49.84 billion,” or nearly P50 billion, as if sheer magnitude were a form of moral immunity. But large figures are not arguments; they are accounting entries. The more money involved, the more urgent the scrutiny becomes, not the less. Yet, here, the number is deployed like a shield or a kind of numerical incantation meant to discourage inquiry rather than withstand it.

So, by his own accounting, nearly P50 billion was poured into Davao City for projects between 2020 and 2022. One is tempted to admire the precision of the figure, if not the argument built upon it.

And, here, a small but inconvenient question intrudes: who exactly was presiding over this period? It was, in fact, the presidency of his father, from 2016 until mid-2022. It was the very same span in which the Discayas themselves have claimed their construction fortunes began to expand to what can only be described as astronomical proportions.

And who, then, is supposed to answer for the Davao projects themselves? Pulong said it is the “engineers, contractors, and political personalities.” Very well. Let them answer, but let us not pretend that political responsibility evaporates upward, dissolving somewhere above the procurement table.

Unable to meet the substance head-on, Pulong’s statement shifted into character assassination as it always does in the overused Duterte playbook.

“Tontong Tinio.” 

“Anti-Duterte operator.” 

“Political grandstanding.”

Fine. But none of these answer the central questions like: Were the projects properly bid? Were they independently audited? Were they cost-efficient? Were they effective in addressing flooding, or merely effective in spending money? Based on the Davao floods, the projects don’t seem effective. 

Is it that Pulong would rather not see the Ombudsman looking too closely at Davao’s flood control projects? If the allegations are false, the remedy is simply to open the books, show the contracts, release the engineering assessments, and produce the audits. Let the records speak. The Ombudsman can make that happen.

Shouldn’t Pulong be supporting Tinio on this? But it looks like he won’t.

Instead, what we get from this Duterte are playground insults masquerading as arguments. Someone should tell this congressman that governance is not adjudicated in a schoolyard, but in a republic.

And, finally, his argument collapses into contradiction without him even noticing it. We are told by him that flooding is a “national problem requiring serious engineering, long-term planning, and cooperation among agencies — not grandstanding before cameras and carrying stacks of folders to create headlines.”

Exactly. That is precisely why scrutiny of flood control spending exists in the first place. Unless, of course, the doctrine being advanced by Pulong is something rather different: that investigation is indispensable, but only when it does not land too close to home, or touch the wrong names, city, or district.

And once all the noise is stripped away, that is all that remains. Pastilan. – Rappler.com