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PLARIDEL, Philippines: The dike meant to protect the Philippine town cost taxpayers nearly $2 million, but when a minister visited this month he found little more than dirt hastily dumped along the river’s banks.
Residents of Plaridel town in Bulacan province, north of the capital Manila, could have told him what happened — contractors had only just begun a project that government officials marked “completed” more than a year earlier.
The dike is one of more than 100 flood-control projects at the center of one of the country’s biggest corruption scandals in decades.
It has already sparked leadership changes in both houses of Congress, but the real impact is among communities left without protection, many of them strung along rivers in the Bulacan region.
“We carry our children to school when the water is high,” Leo Francisco, a construction worker and father of two, told AFP in the village of Bulusan.
“Inside our house, the water is up to our thighs,” the 35-year-old said.
“On the road... sometimes knee-high, sometimes ankle-high. These are ordinary days — not typhoons.”
A flood control project intended to remedy the issue, like so many identified in recent weeks, has never been finished.
“The dike is incomplete, so the water washes in. Even in the built-up sections, the water still gets through from underneath because the pilings are shallow,” Francisco said.

In nearby Plaridel, AFP saw a pair of masons bathing themselves near a half-built dike with exposed metal rods.
The taxpayer money paid for the dike “was clearly stolen,” Public Works Minister Vince Dizon said after visiting the site.
He called it an obvious “ghost project” and said he had fired the district’s chief engineer and two others.

‘The dike is worthless’

Anger has been growing over so-called ghost infrastructure since President Ferdinand Marcos put the issue center-stage in a state of the union address after weeks of deadly flooding.
Greenpeace estimates some $17.6 billion in funds may have been bilked from climate-related projects since 2023, much of it meant for communities that are slowly sinking due to groundwater over-extraction and rising sea levels.
Marcos himself has visited sites caught up in the scandal and slammed the poor quality of the dike in the village of Frances.
“You can crush the cement mix used with your bare hands. They short-changed the cement,” he said, pledging to hold those responsible to account.
Residents said they were pleased to see Marcos but were “waiting for him to deliver.”
“The dike is worthless. It’s full of holes,” said Nelia de los Reyes Bernal, a health worker.
Schoolchildren now wear rubber boots to class after a spike in cases of the bacterial disease leptospirosis and athlete’s foot, she said.
“Construction began last year but it has not been completed, supposedly because funds ran out,” the 51-year-old added.
“There’s no storm and yet the water is rising... We can no longer use the downstairs rooms of our houses. We’ve moved our kitchens to the second floors.”

‘Both guilty’

In Plaridel, 81-year-old Elizabeth Abanilla said she had not followed hearings on the scandal because she doesn’t own a television, but felt contractors were not the only ones to blame.
“It’s the fault of those who gave them money,” she said.
“They should not have handed it over before the job is completed. Both of them are guilty.”
The Philippines has a long history of scandals involving public funds, and high-ranking politicians have typically escaped serious jail time even if convicted of graft.
Thousands are expected to turn out for a protest in the capital on Sunday demanding justice — including prison for those found guilty of involvement in the bogus infrastructure projects.
But for construction worker Francisco, who says the floods are killing his livelihood, that kind of outcome is barely worth dreaming about.
“For me, what’s important is that they return the money,” he said.
“It’s up to God what is to be done with them.”
 

HSINCHU, Taiwan: Taiwan’s space chief Wu Jong-shinn says the “clock is ticking” for the democratic island to launch its own satellites to secure Internet and phone services during a potential conflict with China.
The island faces the constant threat of an invasion by Beijing, which claims the island is part of its territory and in recent years has intensified military pressure.
Taiwan needs 150 of its own low Earth orbit  satellites for “basic communication resilience” in case the subsea telecoms cables connecting the island with the rest of the world are damaged or cut, Wu told AFP in an interview.
It currently has none.
“We need to build up our own technology. But as you know... the clock is ticking,” said Wu, director general of Taiwan Space Agency.
“We need to speed up.”
Taiwanese authorities have already seen what happens when subsea cables are disconnected.
In February 2023, two telecoms lines serving Taiwan’s outlying Matsu archipelago were severed, disrupting communications for weeks.
Taiwan plans to launch the first of six LEO satellites 600 kilometers  above the planet in 2027 as part of its Beyond 5G LEO Satellite program.
US officials have previously cited 2027 as a possible timeline for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
In the meantime, Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom is striking deals with satellite companies around the world to provide back-up telecommunications for the island in case of a war or natural disaster.
Starlink dominates the satellite communications sector, with 8,000 satellites lofted into orbit by Elon Musk’s comparatively cheap, reusable SpaceX rockets.
But Musk’s business ties with China and his previous comments that Taiwan should become part of China have angered the island.
Taiwan instead has signed a multi-million dollar deal with European company Eutelsat, the world’s second-largest operator of LEO satellites.
Eutelsat has more than 600 satellites, following its 2023 merger with British firm OneWeb.
“We’re developing our own technology, but it takes a while, but we can leverage the commercial resources to get us to have this communication resilience,” Wu said.
But Wu said Eutelsat’s satellites were not enough and other providers were needed.
Taiwan has also partnered with US company Astranis and SES of Luxembourg, and is in talks with Amazon’s Kuiper and Canada’s Telesat.
Eutelsat’s satellite system was reportedly used in a Taiwan disaster for the first time in 2024 when a deadly 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck the east coast and knocked out communications.

‘We can’t rely on one side’

Taiwan is light years behind the the US and Chinese space programs.
The rival superpowers have plowed billions of dollars sending people into orbit and launching thousands of satellites.
Taiwan currently has seven meteorological satellites and one optical remote sensing satellite in orbit, and hopes to have “more than 20” by around 2031, Wu said.
It plans to launch a second optical remote sensing satellite in November from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on a SpaceX rocket.
Wu said Taiwan would have its own rockets and launch site in the next decade.
When it comes to communication satellites, however, some question the economic sense of countries developing their own networks when commercial options are available.
“If you want this to work, you need a large number of them in low Earth orbit for that continuous coverage,” Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist and cosmologist at the Australian National University, told AFP.
“You have to be committed to this long-term operation but also then you need to maintain it. Starlink works because they are de-orbiting their satellites every three years, putting up a new one.”
But Taiwanese expert Cathy Fang said it would be “dangerous” for Taiwan to rely only on foreign satellite operators for phone and Internet signal during a war.
Taiwan has learned lessons from Ukraine where Starlink has been a vital communications tool for Ukrainian forces fighting Moscow’s troops.
Musk has admitted blocking a Ukraine attack on Russian warships by turning off Internet access to the system.
“We can’t just rely on one side,” Fang, a policy analyst at the government-backed Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology, told AFP.
“We need to cultivate our industry.”