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Vice President Sara Duterte is at it again, this time suggesting that Filipinos collect floodwater and deliver it to Malacañang for President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to drink. One is tempted to ask whether this is a serious proposal or just a wet and soggy tantrum from someone who, until mid-2024, had no trouble sharing a political raft with the very man she now mocks.
Lawyer Antonio La Viña, former Ateneo School of Government dean and now head of the Klima Center at the Manila Observatory, summed up Sara’s floodwater tirade, as reported by the Inquirer, in one word: “Bataot.” Childish. And how else do we put it?
But somehow I get the drift. Sara’s context was Marcos Jr.’s suggestion that floodwater might be harvested and reused for drinking and agriculture. The idea, while technically possible, seems dangerous and expensive. Our floodwaters are often sewage-contaminated. So, suggesting this can be made potable without qualification or scientific plan, and a clear investment is, at best, wishful thinking for now.
But when Sara opens her mouth to decry environmental incompetence, the irony is so thick you could dam a river with it.
Davao City flooding
One wonders, with no small amount of curiosity, how the vice president might collect Davao City’s own floodwaters and deliver them to city hall for a symbolic family toast. Or better yet, ship them off to The Hague for her father to sample.
Lest we forget, the Dutertes have ruled Davao like a fiefdom since the 1980s, passing the crown from Rodrigo to Sara to Baste Duterte. Yet Davao remains a case study in unmanaged urban sprawl, clogged drainage, and unmitigated flooding. The idea that the Dutertes can now pose as champions of flood control is as convincing as a crocodile shedding tears over a disappearing swamp.
In 2024, Atenews of Ateneo de Davao University reported about what locals have long known: flooding in Davao is not a freak accident of weather, but the result of decades of poor planning, deforestation, mining, and criminal neglect.
“This long overdue issue of flooding has disrupted Davaoeños for so many years. Many areas in the city have been very susceptible to flooding during heavy rains for over two decades. A lot of residents have already adapted to this situation and have accepted that flooding is a part of their lives…,” Atenews reported on March 14, 2024.
In the same report, Davao’s own engineers pointed to blocked waterways and inadequate infrastructure, while environmentalists warned that the hills have been shaved clean and the rivers turned into dumping grounds. The gist of the report is, if Davaoeños are “adapting” to floods, it is not because of resilience but resignation, forced upon them by their own leaders.
What systemic reform, if I may ask, did Davao see under the Duterte patriarch? None. What strategic foresight did Sara bring to the table as mayor? None. What innovation has her brother Baste, Davao’s ex-mayor and now the acting mayor, unveiled to address the deluge? None. Davao’s worsening flooding problem shows that.
For Sara to now scold the Marcos Jr. administration for lacking a flood-control masterplan is an insult to intelligence and a masterclass in projection. She is accusing others of the very sins her own bloodline has committed with impunity.
Rodrigo Duterte’s environmental sins
Her father’s six-year presidency was a missed opportunity. During his term, the country took a deliberate detour into environmental regression. His government did not confront the climate crisis, but colluded with it. Forests were razed, ancestral domains were sold off to cronies, and mining firms were given carte blanche to plunder what remained. These have continued to this day, under his successor’s administration.
Duterte’s signature “environmental” project, the “Dolomite Beach,” was an ugly symbol and is still a reminder of his priorities, and a vanity photo-op built on pulverized rock while Manila’s rivers choked on untreated sewage. It was, quite literally, the political equivalent of embalming a corpse and calling it cured.
When the late environmentalist Gina Lopez dared to hold the mining industry accountable during her brief stint as environment secretary, the Duterte administration dropped her faster than a hot potato. In her place came bureaucrats eager to ink mining deals faster than the ink could dry.
Duterte’s Executive Order 130, signed in 2021, flung the doors wide open to new mining agreements. It lifted the mining moratorium. The Duterte doctrine was clear. If it glitters, they will gut a mountain for it.
During his administration, the country continued to top global charts for environmental murders. It was a distinction that showed not only impunity but complicity. That regime did not merely fail to protect the country’s ecological frontliners but enabled their red-tagging and even execution, draped in the rhetoric of national security.
All the while, environmental defenders, who were often unpaid, unarmed, and unsung, were hunted like guerrillas. During Duterte’s watch, a corrupt mayor could excavate a mountain, but a Lumad farmer defending a forest was branded a terrorist.
“Build, Build, Build” — his proud infrastructure mantra — really meant Build, Break, Bulldoze. It meant dams in ancestral lands, roads through watersheds, and concrete in places that once absorbed floods. The more the country paved over its lungs, the more it drowned in its tears.
Climate change, for Sara’s father, was someone else’s problem, best handled by grandstanding at international forums or shrugging it off in one of his infamous “p***ng ina mo” tirades. His administration’s climate diplomacy was possible only if it came with a bag. Didn’t he scoff at the Paris Agreement because he wanted to know how to access a common fund?
The ex-president’s sins against the environment are many. But the real crime is that they will outlast him. Trees and coral take decades or even centuries to grow, but strongmen like Duterte decompose much faster.
Cynical drama
So, when Sara theatrically decries the absence of a national flood-control strategy, one must ask what legacy she herself inherited and helped entrench. She left the Department of Education (DepEd) with no clear vision, abandoned the so-called “Uniteam” when it was politically convenient, and now seeks absolution by throwing water at the problem.
Such a cynical drama is dynastic politics at its most rotten. It is bluster without backbone, grievance without guilt, and outrage without ownership. The Dutertes want to have it both ways. They wield power with impunity, then pretend to be powerless victims when consequences come crashing in like the monsoon rain.
The floods submerging this country are not acts of nature alone. They are the foreseeable result of decades of policy malpractice, elite avarice, and ecological sabotage, which were all sanctioned from the very seat of power over which Sara continues to salivate with unblushing entitlement.
The blackwater rising in our streets is the accumulated waste of generations of poor and bad governance, including her father’s.
Saba diha, Sara. Pastilan.
– Rappler.com
