Who Builds, Who Betrays

Some raise walls that hold. Other cash in and walk away.

The malignant spirits haunting the country's infrastructure.  "Fly-by-night" contractors rent licenses, inflate credentials, bid impossibly low, subcontract into obscurity, or outright abandon projects. While these mom-and-pop operations, together with their cohorts in government plunder hordes of profits, it is the taxpayers - the hardworking Filipino people - who are left drowning in the mud. (Photo: Senate of the Philippines Social Media unit)

On the night the river rose, families clung to rooftops, praying the flood wall would stand. It didn’t.

Declared “finished” in official reports, it cracked and collapsed after just one season. What gave way was not only concrete, but confidence – the belief that public money had been spent to keep them safe.

Floodwaters are dangerous enough. But the deeper danger is this: when corruption hollows out our defenses, when oversight looks away, when contractors vanish with millions, what truly crumbles are the foundations of trust.

“Fly-by-night” contractors are the ghost stories of infrastructure. They appear from nowhere, win multi-million-peso projects, then vanish – leaving half-built walls, cracked roads, or worse, nothing at all.

They thrive on loopholes, patronage, and weak enforcement. Yet for every sham operator, there are firms that endure: they follow the rules, keep people and equipment on the ground, and build works that last.

If anger paints them all with the same brush, we punish the legitimate and sabotage progress itself.

By law, every contractor must be licensed by the Philippine Contractors Accreditation Board (PCAB) and registered with the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH). Real contractors comply.

They prove capacity, field skilled workers, and finish projects to standard.

Fly-by-nights do the opposite: rent licenses, inflate credentials, bid impossibly low, subcontract into obscurity, or abandon works outright. Their evidence is visible: cracks, leaks, and collapses.

These scams are engineered by loopholes, collusion, and complacency. License renting lets small firms masquerade as giants. Companies with laughable capitalization land contracts worth hundreds of millions.

Ghost projects swallow real budgets: flood barriers “completed” only on paper, reinforced walls that inspections later find missing altogether.

Barangay captains will tell you: paperwork says the wall is done, but on the ground, there’s only rusting rebar and mud. Each rainy season, families brace for the river’s rise, wondering why their taxes built nothing to protect them.

And the rot doesn’t end with contractors. Funds slip through last-minute budget insertions.

Engineers whisper about being forced to “return” slices of project money just to get approvals.

These are not accidents. They are systemic betrayals.

The task is double-edged: hunt down the fraudulent but defend the legitimate. Blacklist the guilty, yes – but protect those who invest in skill, integrity, and honest work.

To conflate both is to bury good builders under the rubble left by bad ones.

Citizens, regulators, communities – sharpen your eyes. Ask: Who really built this? Who only pretended? Hold cheats accountable. Honor those who build with courage and competence.

Because the rains will come again. And when they do, a nation must decide: do we entrust our future to those who betray – or to those who build?

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