The flood-control scandal is no longer a controversy. It is a detonation. Two bombs went off in one day: Elizaldy Co directly implicating the President in the P100-billion insertions, and former DPWH Undersecretary Roberto Bernardo naming senators, mayors, congressmen, and Cabinet-level officials as beneficiaries of a multibillion-peso kickback machine. The system did not just leak. It collapsed under the weight of its own lies.
The hearings no longer resemble oversight. They look like an autopsy.
Co’s video is the most explosive insider confession in years. He said the President ordered the insertion of P100 billion. He said Martin Romualdez told him to flee the country and “he will be taken care of.” He said he was told he would be shot if he talked. He described meetings in Malacañang. He described the brown leather bag. He described a budget process that looked less like governance and more like syndicate operations. He did not hint. He named. He did not allege. He implicated.
Then came Bernardo. In calm, lethal detail, he named Bong Revilla, Jinggoy Estrada, Chiz Escudero, Grace Poe, Nancy Binay, Mitch Cajayon-Uy, Florida Robes, Mark Villar, Manuel Bonoan, Cathy Cabral, Maynard Ngu and more. He said he handled billions. He said he delivered cash to lawmakers’ aides and homes. He said DPWH allocations were controlled by a cartel of senior officials. He did not suggest corruption. He confirmed architecture.
The scandal is no longer about contractors. It is about the political class itself. The state is not simply compromised. It is compromised from the top down.
And this is where the Great Implosion begins.
The Real Winners: Sara Duterte and the Political Opportunists
The greatest beneficiary is Sara Duterte. She has been waiting for this moment. The Uniteam is dead, the House leadership shattered, the Senate’s sheen of moral superiority destroyed by its own members, and the Marcos administration is consumed by contradiction. Every new revelation weakens the President’s credibility, his Cabinet’s integrity, and his cousin’s political machinery. Duterte does not need to attack; the testimonies are doing it for her. She does not need to prove weakness in the administration; it is proving it every time another official is implicated. Her narrative has always been simple: Marcos is fragile, Marcos is soft, Marcos is surrounded by thieves, Marcos cannot control his people. The hearings now deliver the evidence she never needed to say out loud.
Every senator named in kickbacks. Every DPWH official exposed. Every allegation that touches Malacañang. All of it strengthens her case that the ruling coalition is rotten and that she alone carries the “toughness” her base craves.
Indeed, she benefits not because she is innocent. She benefits because, in Philippine politics, innocence is irrelevant. What matters is who survives the explosion. She is positioned as the lone figure outside the blast radius, ready to frame herself as the victim of a corrupt elite, the avenger of public anger, and the inheritor of a failed administration’s rage. Political opportunists also benefit. Those who have long resented Marcos, who have been sidelined, humiliated, or displaced by his inner circle, now see an opening. As the administration bleeds, the vultures circle. The implosion has created a vacuum, and opportunists know that nature, and politics, abhor vacuums.
Also rising are the political opportunists: those who long waited for the moment Marcos would stumble. Now the stumble has turned into a fall. Expect the familiar choreography: senators suddenly discovering moral outrage, governors subtly shifting allegiance, party leaders praising “courageous whistleblowers” while preparing to switch camps. Opportunism is the most renewable resource in Filipino politics.
And this scandal is the oxygen they have been waiting for.
The Great Losers: The Administration, the Legislature, the State and the Filipino people
The losers are far easier to identify. The Marcos administration is the biggest loser not because it is innocent, but because it is exposed. It can no longer claim credit for exposing corruption because it is now implicated at the highest levels by its own allies. You cannot declare shock at budget anomalies when your own Budget Secretary, your legislative liaison, and your Speaker are in the conversation. You cannot pretend to govern when every institutional channel reveals rot.
Moreso, it cannot distance itself from Zaldy Co because Co was part of its governing core. It cannot weaponize moral outrage because its fingerprints are all over the machinery Co described. Co’s testimony did not wound the Palace. It gutted it.
In politics, hypocrisy is more fatal than crime, and Marcos now stands accused of both.
Romualdez is another casualty. He is not merely weakened; he is politically wrecked. Co’s allegations directly contradict the Speaker’s carefully constructed narrative of loyalty and distance. If Co’s documents and evidence hold, Romualdez becomes not the shield of the administration but its enforcer. His fall is no longer a question of possibility but timing.
The Senate loses its last shred of moral legitimacy. The chamber that branded itself as the conscience of the nation is now neck-deep in allegations of twelve to twenty five percent kickbacks. Revilla, Estrada, Poe, Escudero and Binay have issued denials, but denials no longer cure reputational rot. The Blue Ribbon Committee can no longer act as the watchdog of the Republic when its own members appear in the witness list. What we see now is not accountability. It is cannibalism.
Congress as an institution is collapsing under the spectacle. Every hearing exposes not the contractors but the lawmakers. Every testimony reveals not anomalies but a pattern. Every affidavit shows how corruption is not an aberration but a governing model. The legislative branch is in freefall, and the public no longer distinguishes between the guilty and the merely incompetent. They see one thing: a political class feeding on its own.
The state itself is the long-term casualty. This is the kind of scandal that erodes legitimacy, corrodes public trust, and accelerates institutional decay. When people see senators alleged to have taken twelve percent, twenty percent, twenty-five percent, they stop believing in laws. When they see DPWH officials allegedly moving projects like merchandise, they stop believing in public service. And when they see Malacañang allegedly ordering P100-billion insertions, they stop believing in leadership.
The political class has detonated its own credibility.
The Filipino people are, as always, the ultimate losers. They watch their taxes stolen, their roads undermined, their flood control imaginary, their institutions reduced to hollow sets. The implosion of the political elite is not a cleansing. It is a contagion. And the people will bear its cost long after the politicians have negotiated their deals, filed their counter-affidavits and prepared their reinvention campaigns.
But the real tragedy is that the scandal exposes corruption, but it does not guarantee transformation. It punishes one faction, but it empowers another. The country watches a government destroy itself, but the debris is picked up not by idealists, but by opportunists.
The Great Implosion is not cleansing the system. It is rearranging the predators.
What we are witnessing now is the most significant self-inflicted political collapse since the fertilizer fund scandal and the PDAF catastrophe combined. The flood-control hearings are not just about the floods and its victims. They are about rot. They show a government cannibalizing itself. And as the machine breaks apart, the only people rising are those who know how to thrive in ruins.
The nation deserves accountability. What it is getting is a power vacuum. And in Philippine politics, vacuums are never empty for long.