Democracy for Sale: How Contractors Hijack Our Right to Vote
Beyond the rot exposed in the flood control mess lies a deeper, more insidious truth: the greatest damage inflicted on our democracy is not in the poorly built dikes or the missing millions, but in the stolen integrity of our elections.
These contractors are not mere builders of roads and bridges. They are financiers of power. They bankroll incumbents, suffocate challengers, and mortgage the future of entire localities. The system they created is elegant in its corruption: advance payments, they call it—money handed over before an election, cashed against projects not yet even drawn on the drafting table.
The cost? Democracy itself.
Once elected, officials repay their “benefactors” not with gratitude but with contracts—rigged bids that are neither open nor fair. Projects are “assigned” long before the first piece of paper is filed. To the highest political bidder goes the spoils, and to the public goes the bill. This vicious cycle has become not the exception, but the rule.
And yet, in the outrage over Senate hearings and blue ribbon investigations, there is a truth too uncomfortable to ignore: we are complicit. Every peso contractors advanced to politicians found its way into envelopes, groceries, and t-shirts that bought our votes. Every pothole unpaved, every bridge that collapses in the rain, every flood that drowns our barangays traces back not just to the collusion of politicians and contractors, but to the bargain we ourselves struck at the ballot box.
Democracy has not been killed in one fell swoop. It has been pawned, piece by piece, to the interests of the few who treat elections as business ventures and the people as their returns on investment.
This is not merely corruption of infrastructure. It is corruption of choice, of freedom, of the very act of voting. Unless we break this cycle, we will not only inherit broken floodways and sinking roads—we will inherit a democracy gutted by greed and willingly sold at the cheapest price: our own vote.
This is not merely corruption of infrastructure. It is corruption of choice, of freedom, of the very act of voting. Unless we break this cycle, we will not only inherit broken floodways and sinking roads—we will inherit a democracy gutted by greed and willingly sold at the cheapest price: our own vote.
