With less than a year left, the Duterte administration has completed only nine big-ticket projects out of targeted 119 under its flagship infrastructure program. Officials urge the next administration to continue the projects.
At a glance
- As the Duterte administration enters its final year, only nine big-ticket projects out of targeted 119 have been completed under its flagship Build, Build, Build infrastructure program.
- The list of projects has been revised several times in the past five years, indicating a constant reality check on what an economist calls “overly ambitious” program.
- Despite President Duterte’s pivot to China for funding, deals with Beijing were moving slowly.
- Duterte officials urge the next administration to continue the Build, Build, Build projects.
Throughout President Rodrigo Duterte’s term, Philippine economic managers touted the Build, Build, Build infrastructure program as fuel to economic growth.
From the original 75 projects promised, Build, Build, Build has evolved to a massive program of 119 projects. So far, as the Duterte administration enters its last year, only nine of them have been completed.
Concerned agencies are fast-tracking the implementation of infrastructure projects, targeting 14 projects for completion by this year, and 17 more by 2022. Another obstacle awaits them: in half a year, the election ban that covers infrastructure projects will take effect.
‘Too challenging to pursue’
In 2017, the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) identified 75 high-priority projects under the Build, Build, Build program.
By 2021, only half of those survived.
Every year, NEDA releases a list of priority infrastructure projects, and every year there re revisions to the list. Rappler compiled these and put them together in a timeline to see how the list evolved. See the diagram below:
Build, Build, Build from 2017 to 2021
This diagram shows when a project became part of the Duterte administration’s flagship infrastructure program and up until when it was retained in the list. Click the lines to see the projects.
In late 2019, then-NEDA secretary Ernesto Pernia already hinted that several big-ticket bridge projects would no longer be pursued. By 2020, it became official – a dozen bridge projects were shelved, including those that were meant to connect Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao. Some were “too challenging to pursue,” he said, and these, of course, had cost implications.
The Duterte administration’s seeming disinterest in Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) projects also led to the removal of the EDSA-central business districts and BGC-NAIA BRT lines from the priority list. The Department of Transportation (DOTr) seemed to favor railway projects, but still committed to BRT Line 1 or the Quezon Avenue line.
In lieu of the total 30 projects shelved, 71 “new” projects were considered part of the flagship infrastructure program. Several of them were actually ongoing projects, like the recently opened Light Rail Transit Line 2 (LRT2) East Extension, Skyway 3, C5 South Link, Boracay Circumferential Road, and the National Broadband Program.
In Duterte’s final year, NEDA removed three more projects but added another 14.
Among those removed was the Camarines Sur Expressway project, which would link San Fernando and Pili towns. Civil works already started in 2018, but construction progress lagged at 15%, as of March 2021. The tollway is slated for completion by 2024.
The ICT Capability Development and Management program of the Department of Information and Communication Technology (DICT), introduced in the 2020 list, was also removed from the latest priorities. Another ICT project was included instead: the Digital Transformation Center project, which aims to upgrade the current Tech4Ed centers that allow learners and workers in far-flung communities to access the internet.
Meanwhile, ongoing COVID-19 projects funded by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), as well as the Philippine ID System, were added to the 2021 list, along with the Sangley Airport, which was already inaugurated by Duterte in February 2020.
‘We delivered’
In mid-June, the infrastructure cluster of the Duterte administration gave a progress update on the Build, Build, Build program, choosing the almost-finished Estrella-Pantaleon Bridge in Makati City as the location for the briefing.
There, Presidential Adviser for Flagship Programs and Projects Vince Dizon proudly stated that infrastructure spending from 2017 to 2019, on average, reached P932 billion or 6% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).
“The Duterte administration delivered. Nobody can dispute that because all the numbers we’re presenting are true,” said Dizon in Filipino.
In 2020, pandemic restrictions hampered infrastructure rollout, and spending declined to P869.5 billion or 4.8% of the GDP. But as the government starts relaxing lockdowns, the Duterte administration is planning to spend P1.25 trillion or 5.7% of the GDP by the end of 2021.
The initial target is that infrastructure spending should grow between 7% and 7.5% of the GDP by 2022.
Infrastructure officials have been repeating that thousands of kilometers of roads, thousands of bridges, and hundreds of seaports and airports “have been completed” within five years. Data show that those infrastructures were existing and rehabilitated, and not all of them were newly constructed.
These figures, in fact, mostly refer to other infrastructure projects outside of the priority program. Build, Build, Build, according to officials, is the overall infrastructure program of the government, not just the big-ticket projects.
But of the flagship projects, only nine projects have been completed.
Completed flagship infrastructure projects
This table shows a project’s status and target year for completion as published on NEDA’s annual list of flagship infrastructure projects.
Note that, in government pronouncements, officials say that 11 projects have already reached the finish line. The other two are the BGC-Ortigas Link and the Estrella-Pantaleon Bridge.
So far, only the Sta Monica-Lawton Bridge component has been completed for the BGC-Ortigas Center Link, while final civil works for the Estrella-Pantaleon Bridge are still being done. Both of these projects, including the Binondo-Intramuros Bridge, were initially eyed for completion in 2020.
To be completed by 2022
This table shows a project’s status and target year for completion as published on NEDA’s annual list of flagship infrastructure projects.
In the next two years, 31 projects shall have been completed by contractors. What’s interesting about this list is that only five were part of the original priority program from 2017. The number hikes up to nine if we include the completed ones.
This shows that majority of the projects that are about to be completed in the next couple of months were only inserted into the list in 2020.
The Pasig-Marikina River improvement project and the flood control projects for Cagayan, Tagoloan, Imus, and Cagayan de Oro rivers are the only three projects from 2021. To add, the Luzon flood control project – a major program funded by the Japanese – has been ongoing since 2018. Work for Cagayan and Tagoloan rivers was concluded in 2019.
Moving target
Why is it important to emphasize the dates when the projects were added to the priority list?
University of the Philippines economist and Rappler columnist JC Punongbayan says that comparing any lineup with the original list of promises is important to hold officials accountable.
“I think the Duterte administration was overly ambitious,” said Punongbayan.
Even Pernia admitted that the Duterte government was too ambitious. “Usually human nature, we tend to, in general, tend to be ambitious at the start, then a long list of undertakings need to be carried out,” he told Rappler in 2019.
While it is not bad to have optimism in the early years of the administration, revisions also indicate a reality check.
Punongbayan said: “If the targets keep changing, then it would be difficult to assess their success. Similar to economic goalposts, targets for Build, Build, Build were constantly revised so they could achieve them.”
The most noteworthy of all promises, perhaps, is the Mindanao Railway. Duterte in 2016 said that the railway project “should really come first” because Mindanaoans needed it.
When NEDA first released the priority projects in 2017, three phases of the railway project were included in the list. That year, Phase 1 or the Tagum-Davao-Digos line was targeted for completion in just two years with local financing.
In the succeeding years, several changes were made to the project. There was a shift to foreign funding, costs ballooned to P81.69 billion from P35.26 billion, and the target completion was postponed to 2022. Also removed from the list were phases 2 and 3 of the massive rail project, which were supposed to extend the yet-to-be-constructed Davao line to cover the rest of the island region.