[OPINION] ICI: Governance as performance art
In the Philippines, governance often feels like performance art staged on an endlessly rotating platform. Each time a scandal breaks, the government brings out a familiar set piece: a grand inquiry, a new commission, a solemn announcement that at last, this time, we will get to the bottom of things. Nobody asks why there are so many bottoms to get to, or why the pit keeps getting deeper.
Enter the Independent Commission for Infrastructure, the newest act in our national repertoire. Launched through Executive Order No. 94, it promises to hunt down ghost bridges, phantom canals, and flood-control structures that seem to specialize in controlling everything except floods. You’ve heard of modern art. This is modern governance: conceptual, expensive, and oddly resistant to physical verification.
But before we applaud the opening scene, it helps to recall the prequels. There have been so many.
In 1983, the Agrava Board investigated the assassination of Ninoy Aquino and delivered two contradictory reports—one blaming the military, the other clearing them—like a choose-your-own-ending novel printed by a government press that couldn’t decide whether truth was tragedy or farce. After the dictatorship, human-rights commissions were formed to document abuses, only to discover that the past was bigger than the bureaucracy assigned to catalogue it. The Presidential Commission on Good Government has been chasing Marcos' ill-gotten wealth for so long that its docket is beginning to look like an heirloom.
Then came the era of quick-burn commissions. Fidel Ramos launched anti-smuggling and anti-crime councils that dissolved quietly into the 1990s humidity. Joseph Estrada produced task forces that evaporated before the ink dried on their mandates. Gloria Arroyo created bodies that investigated briefly and adjourned indefinitely, the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug. Rodrigo Duterte unveiled the Presidential Anti-Corruption Commission, which barked loudly and then tiptoed offstage before anyone could locate the case files.
And, of course, the Philippine Truth Commission of 2010—launched with orchestra, sued with urgency, and struck down in Biraogo v. Philippine Truth Commission. The Supreme Court reminded the nation that the President may reorganize the Executive, yes, but may not create a tribunal aimed at a single administration. Selective truth, the Court held, is still a lie—one merely written with government letterheads and better stationery.
So when the ICI appeared, many Filipinos didn’t gasp. They sighed.
This time, though, the stage design is more complicated. Former House appropriations chair Zaldy Co has claimed that he facilitated roughly P100 billion in flood-control budget insertions—allegedly at the direction of President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. and ex-House Speaker Martin Romualdez. He denies taking money, but admits that bags of cash were delivered to the Romualdez in Forbes Park and even inside Malacañang. These claims have not yet made their way through due process, but they hang over the ICI like a boom microphone accidentally lowered onto the set: a visible reminder that someone forgot where the script was supposed to end.
And yet the ICI must now investigate the very terrain where these allegations sit. The institution built by the Executive is asked to examine the Executive. The commission designed to spotlight the darkness must first navigate the shadows cast by its own source of power.
Legally, Malacañang leans on a well-worn tripod. One leg is Article VII, Section 17 of the Constitution, which gives the President control over the Executive and the unenviable duty of ensuring that laws do more than gather dust. Another is the General Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2025, reinforced by the Government Optimization Act of 2025, which empowers him to reorganize or even create executive offices when public interest demands. And the last is Larin v. Executive Secretary (1997), the jurisprudential reminder that a president may rearrange the furniture of the Executive branch—but may not add a new wing without Congress signing off.
But now Congress wants to give the ICI powers that belong to the Office of the Ombudsman: contempt, hold-departure orders, and even direct lines to the Sandiganbayan. That’s where Biraogo whispers from the casebooks: a structurally defective commission cannot be saved by noble purpose alone.
As if the plot needed more twists, a petition from public school teacher John Barry Tayam appeared on the docket. In one stroke, it argues that the ICI duplicates existing institutions, risks unequal protection, and lets the Executive investigate itself. In the next, it asks the Supreme Court to declare Executive Order No. 94 “valid and constitutional” and determine its scope. The filing is earnest, sincere, and shaped exactly like a Möbius strip—critique on one side, affirmation on the other, with no clear point where one becomes the other. The Court cannot issue advisory opinions, but the petition mirrors a broader national sentiment: a distrust of old institutions paired with desperate hope in new ones, even when both look suspiciously alike.
This, perhaps, is the heart of the matter. Each new commission is less a solution than a confession: the existing machinery no longer works. The Office of the Ombudsman is too slow, the Commission on Audit too cautious, the Department of Justice too politicized. (Editor's Note: The Office of the Ombudsman on Nov. 18 filed graft and malversation cases against Co and several Department of Public Works and Highways officials) And so the state does what artists do when a canvas disappoints—it reaches for a fresh one, even as the underlying technique remains unchanged.
Yet it would be unwise to dismiss the ICI entirely. Infrastructure corruption hides in procurement schedules, engineering jargon, and progress reports written in bureaucratic Esperanto. A well-resourced, insulated commission could, in theory, illuminate what the ordinary audit misses.
But only if it refuses to become another prop. Only if it investigates upward as fiercely as it investigates outward. Only if it remembers that independence is not a gift handed down from the Executive but a boundary drawn against it—and guarded daily.
If the ICI can do that, then perhaps this performance might, for once, end differently. Perhaps the curtain will rise on something other than another committee, another press conference, another promise designed to evaporate under the next administration.
In a country that produces inquiries faster than infrastructure, that alone would be avant-garde.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the opinions of PhilSTAR L!fe, its parent company and affiliates, or its staff.
Want to get published on PhilSTAR L!fe? We’re accepting submissions for guest essays and features from aspiring and experienced writers in the country. Send us your original piece at hey@philstarlife.com for review and possible publication.