The avalanche of Congressional inquiries and whistleblower stories on the trillion-peso guni-guni flood control projects has awakened the citizenry to the massive corruption being committed by those in power. The people’s outrage was in full display on September 21, at the Luneta Park and the Edsa shrine.

Now, how can corruption, a never-ending and ever-growing problem in the Philippines, be tamed?

As it is, many in the September 21 rallies find the government’s response still weak and lacking in resolve? On Congressional inquiries: how can those involved in the flood scandals, the errant legislators in particular, be part of the committees to investigate the crime of corruption? And can the Independent Commission for Infrastructures undertake thorough cleansing of the graft-ridden infra development system when the commission is ad-hoc in character and limited to fact-finding work? How will these bodies address corruption issues linked to the highest officials of the land?

Is the President serious in pursuing a national cleansing of the graft-ridden infra and social spending processes? Does the President have the guts to ask family  members and political allies involved in corruption to take a leave and allow a truly independent body with powers to hold accountable those guilty of corruption to be established, as suggested by Rep. Leila de Lima? Can FM Jr. be the bold reformer the nation is waiting for, or will he behave like his predecessors who barked loudly against corruption at the beginning, only to do nothing once the furor dies down? Is he prepared to break the ties that bind him to the KKK club—Kamag-anak, Kaklase, Kabarkada?

In the meantime, the nation is getting shocking revelations on how high-level corruption is being committed by criminal syndicates led by government officials, as Congressman Toby Tiangco put it. The gangs of plunderers have very deep connections in government and operate like Italian mafiosos. Based on PBBM’s list of top contractors, there are syndicates in different regions/districts of the country, some with a long history of plundering public funds under different administrations.

Who comprise a typical syndicate? They consist of the following:

First, you have the rent-seeking contractors eager to capture huge profits by making little or even no investments that result in substandard or non-existent projects. Of course, these contractors cannot bag juicy projects without the facilitating assistance of the get-rich-quick DPWH engineers and staff. And then to make these projects “move” and get funded, these contractors and engineers have to secure the support of conniving officials in the executive branch, e.g., DBM, DOF, COA, etc. All these players are bound by some kind of an omerta code of silence.

But most importantly, the syndicates have godfathers, the ring leaders. They are the influential politicians who sit on top of the corruption ladder. They are the dynastic rulers of the land. They wield political power and shamelessly engage in primitive accumulation for the benefit of their families, clans and supporters. They tinker with the budgets, ingeniously shaping them to suit their plundering programs with the support of their chosen contractor firms, some of which they themselves set up or are run by family members and cronies.

With the illicit funds that they acquire, the plundering political elites perpetuate themselves and their families in power by spreading ‘ayuda’ to voters to get themselves elected with no hassle.  The ayuda taken from the national budget (e.g., TUPAD, AKAP, etc.) or shaved from the DPWH and other government projects make them “popular” overnight to dirt-poor voters. Thus, Partylists and dynastic congressmen do not even go to the trouble of drawing up comprehensive economic-political reform programs and conducting prolonged campaigns to win popular support. They simply go around distributing “ayuda” one or two weeks before the elections. 

In a number of congressional districts, the electoral contest is reduced to a battle of who could give the bigger ayuda, ayuda that could go as high as P15,000 or more per voter. The competition to get the voters’ interest based on the development vision and reform agenda of a candidate in a congressional district becomes meaningless. There are no healthy political debates on problems such as joblessness, landlessness and homelessness among the voting poor in a district and how the dynastic candidates plan to address them. In the 2025 elections, a dynastic political family in a Mindanao province was even reported to have promised the barangay captains that their barangays would receive numerous benefits, including a barangay vehicle, if they deliver zero votes to their opponents.

The foregoing dynastic way of buying votes is well known across the archipelago. And yet, the Comelec does not have the will or courage to correct vote buying. The Comelec simply asks concerned citizens to file verified and documented complaints instead of the Comelec itself, motu proprio, fielding agents to stop vote buying, which is usually conducted in an organized way in barangay halls across the country. The Comelec further erodes the credibility of the electoral results when it refuses to cooperate with  the demand of IT experts to explain why the audited source code in the automated election system was not used and why there were millions of spoiled overvotes for partylists and senators.

Once in power, the dynastic political elite unabashedly use government resources not only to reward families and loyalists but also to place them in key government positions that enable them to control national and local spending and secure the license to exploit natural and other resources. They have also transformed the IMF-WB policy prescriptions of privatization and trade/investment liberalization as instruments to develop rent-seeking monopolies out of privatized public services (power, water, etc.) and liberalized trade systems. The clear outcomes of this governance arrangement are disempowerment of the poor and their communities and the deeper social and economic inequality at both local and national levels.

The dominant political dynastic families get themselves re-elected regularly even if some political reformers somehow succeed “sporadically and for short periods of time,” as a German scholar Peter Kruizer noted (“Mafia-style domination in the Philippines”, 2012). Comparing the country to Italy, Kruizer concluded that “Mafia-style domination is part and parcel of the democratic political process” in the Philippines.

But is this real democracy? A government of the few for the few? An elite in perpetual control of the government through patronage politics, vote buying, business monopolies, etc.? They even have the Comelec as a virtual ally, a Comelec that is unable to explain creditably the non-use of the audited hash code in the 2025 automated elections, which elicited the remark of former DICT Undersecretary Elisio Rio that Philippine democracy has become a “farce.” 

Given the malgovernance of the country and the large-scale plunder that the ruling political dynasties are committing, the political-economic system looks more and more like a mafia-run machinery managed by powerful syndicates. Breaking this dynastic rule, as mandated by the 1987 Constitution, is clearly a moral, economic and political necessity. To upend this rule is to unlock the country’s democratic potential to build a more just, inclusive and sustainable society.