PHILIPPINE President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr and his associated kleptocrats in the Filipino ruling elite are in trouble.

On Saturday September 20, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos took to the streets of Manila, Cebu and other major cities in anger over the serial looting by politicians and contractors of more than £1 billion earmarked for flood-control projects.

The Philippines comprises 7,500 islands in the middle of a major typhoon track in the Pacific. Each year, hundreds of lives are needlessly lost and millions displaced, some for months or even years at a time, not simply because of natural forces but by the country’s wholly inadequate infrastructure that leaves millions at risk.

In Manila, the peaceful protests spilt over into violent clashes between police and mostly youthful crowds enraged by the plundering of their country.

The loot comes from so-called “ghost infrastructure projects.” This has been conservatively estimated to be worth at least 118.5bn pesos (£1.6bn) between 2023 and 2025. Projects were either massively scaled down from the original plans or were entirely nonexistent. However, activist groups warn that the real loss could be nine times higher, according to the Philippine Star newspaper.

The paper trail is in a series of proposals and amendments inserted by lawmakers into the government budget and channelled through the department of public works and highways. Contractors, often bidding for tenders under multiple shell companies, then gave kickbacks to local politicians, and in some cases, politicians’ families were the contractors.

In his July 28 state of the nation address, Marcos admitted that, since taking office in 2022, of the 545bn pesos allocated for flood control, 100bn pesos went to just 15 contractors. Many projects were not even allocated to the most flood-prone districts.

In August, a senator alleged that 67 lawmakers had acted both as legislators, securing funds for their constituencies, and as private contractors, often skimming as much as 40 per cent of the funds, the rest going to bribe auditors, department of public works and highways officials and others.

Marcos was forced to establish an independent commission for infrastructure on September 11 to investigate corruption in public works projects following congressional hearings that exposed rampant embezzlement.

Corruption scandals are hardly news in the Philippines, but the astonishing scale and blatant thievery of the elite have unleashed floods of a very different kind, waves of popular revulsion and protest that might just lead to the ouster of President Marcos 2.0, or Bongbong Marcos, as he is colloquially known.

The scandal has already led to the resignation of house of representatives speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez, long seen as the president’s fixer in the chamber and a likely presidential contender in 2028. Romualdez is also the cousin of Marcos, on his mother Imelda’s side, and the son of the serving Philippine ambassador to Washington, Jose Manuel “Babe” del Gallego Romualdez.

The Philippine Centre for Investigative Journalism claims that Marcos himself received hundreds of thousands of pounds in campaign contributions during the 2022 elections from two government contractors, despite a ban on candidates accepting donations from companies doing business with the government.

Both identified donors saw major increases in government contracts after the 2022 elections. It is estimated that 50 major construction contractors nationwide made similar illegal campaign donations.

In addition to the corruption scandal that reaches deep into his own family, Marcos Jnr prematurely attempted to destroy his erstwhile allies, the Davao-based Duterte dynasty, without first securing sufficient support. Both Marcos Jnr and Duterte Jnr had been elected as part of a so-called “uni-party movement.” The Marcos clan delivered thumping majorities from their base in the north, while further south, the Dutertes did likewise in Mindanao and much of the key Visayan region.

The split between the nepo-babies is exemplified by the choreographed extradition of former president Rodrigo Duterte to the Hague in March and botched attempts to impeach his daughter, serving Vice-President Sara Duterte. This resulted in a major electoral setback for Marcos Jnr’s plans in the May elections. 

The Duterte camp secured enough seats in the country’s senate and house of representatives to ward off any constitutional attempt to unseat her. This sets the scene for a national showdown for the 2028 presidential elections between the two clans. Marcos Jnr cannot run for a second term due to presidential term limits, but Sara Duterte can.

In the event of a Duterte victory, the Marcos-Romualdez camp can expect endless investigations and prosecutions, again a familiar scenario in this south-east Asian nation of around 116 million people.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Vietnam, a fellow member of the Association of South East Nations (Asean) provides a useful comparison. With a population of just over 101 million, it is demographically comparable to the Philippines. However, Vietnam’s path of a socialist-oriented market economy has delivered, not without its own problems and failures along the way, it has to be acknowledged, an entirely different model from the Philippines’s dependent neocolonial capitalism.

The Philippines does not have a single steel plant and imports 86 per cent of its steel needs from Vietnam, which produces 10 times more than its Asean counterpart.

In 2023, manufacturing as a percentage of GDP in the Philippines was only 16 per cent against 24 per cent in Vietnam — China’s figure was 26 per cent, while India’s was 13 per cent.

Vietnam also outperforms the Philippines on most life indicators, such as life expectancy and infant mortality. It overtook the Philippines in per capita GDP in 2020 and total GDP in 2022 — and this from a much lower starting point. There are clearly alternatives for the Filipino people.

Operating in the background, ever-present, is the malign influence of the US. The bloodstained colonial ruler of the Philippines between 1898 and 1946, with a brief and brutal occupation by Imperial Japan, the US established an almost textbook example of neocolonialism in the post-war period.

Despite his pre-election promise to steer a neutral course between China and the US, Marcos Jnr soon abandoned this for a pro-Washington foreign and military policy. This appears at least partly designed to trade the return of US military bases to the Philippines for immunity over outstanding charges against him and other family members in US courts for unpaid damages over human rights abuses during his father’s rule.

Marcos Jnr’s turn began under the Biden-Harris administration and continues under Trump, with the Philippines acting as Washington’s human shield in the South China Sea, as it provokes China.

As with any US stooge, there are unfortunate precedents for Marcos Jnr. In 1986, his father was brought down and forced into exile during the People Power revolution against his rule.

However, alongside the very visible grassroots mass movement was a calculated behind-the-scenes transfer of power that brought together the Catholic church, the Aquino family oligarchs, the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the US, which spirited the Marcos family to Hawaii.

A second military-driven overthrow took place in 2001 with the removal of president Joseph Estrada. The Armed Forces of the Philippines does not move in these circumstances without US approval. Washington is a fickle master.

The immediate beneficiaries of the Marcos Jnr meltdown are likely to be the Duterte camp, itself riddled with corruption and soaked in the blood of thousands of extrajudicial killings in “the war against drugs” during Rodrigo’s administration.

Until the Filipino people can develop and implement a programme for truly independent national development, break the parasitic domestic oligarchies and end foreign domination, millions will continue to suffer.