HE HAD BEEN dubbed as a so-called “engineer of progress” as he had served as a high-ranking official of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) from formerly being the president and chief-executive-officer of the San Miguel Corporation (SMC)’s tollways, but the Mapúa Institute of Technology (MIT) civil engineering graduate has been unmasked.
Following developments in the Congressional investigations on the anomalous flood control projects of the DPWH, erstwhile public works secretary Manuel Bonoan, who also has a graduate degree in highway engineering from the the University of New South Wales in Australia, turns out to be a contractor’s errand boy in his pristine barong tagalog.
Fortunately for the Filipino people, our good Senator Panfilo “Ping” Lacson has dragged Bonoan in the limelight of derision and what the public sees now is not competence, as his benefactor President Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr. puts it, but It is rather an abominable picture of rot and greed and the betrayal by a trusted official.
‘(He) is no technocrat but a parasite, a scavenger, a thief dressed up in his dainty. He belongs in the same garbage heap as every plunderer before him—stripped of honor, credibility and wealth and left as a cautionary warning of how deeply steeped in rot and decay the DPWH truly is!’
THE UGLY TRUTH
Here is the ugly truth—while Filipinos were drowning in flood waters in their communities, Bonoan’s cohorts in the DPWH were drowning in hundreds of million of cash.
The fact is that Globalcrete Builders—a company tied to his own family circle—bagged ₱2.195 billion worth of flood-control contracts between 2018 and 2024.
If one call this as public service, then government procedure is actually organized plunder with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
And this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Take the ₱1-billion Wyndham Garden Hotel in Clark—a monument not to progress but to greed—as an example!
Who’s behind it, people ask? The hotel’s builder, MBB Global Properties Corporation is run by the daughters of Candaba, Pampanga mayor Rene Maglanque and former DPWH undersecretary Roberto Bernardo and Bonoan’s own daughter Fatima Gay Bonoan as treasurer
So, this is the “holy trinity” of corruption: Maglanque, Bernardo, Bonoan or MBB.
BLEED, BLEED, BLEED
With this traitorous scheme in focus, what the resigned public works chief has symbolically tagged as “Build, Build, Build” is in truth better described as ‘Bleed, Bleed, Bleed’.
It now appears that Bonoan’s actual idea of public service is that every road is a cash cow, every bridge is a trough of ill-gotten wealth and every flood-control project is just a dam holding back the truth—until it burst with the discovery of substandard and “ghost” projects.
So this trusted man by President Marcos Jr. deserves no deference, no soft landing and, moreover, no honorable exit. He should be remembered not as an “infrastructure czar” but rather a coroner who undermined public trust.
CIRCLE OF LACKEYS
While ordinary Filipinos waded in waist-deep floodwaters, Bonoan and his circle of lackeys were swimming in contracts that cemented their luxurious lifestyle as the country literally drowned in graft and corruption.
In view of this, therefore, there can be only one verdict: Manny Bonoan is no technocrat but a parasite, a scavenger, a thief dressed up in his dainty. He belongs in the same garbage heap as every plunderer before him—stripped of honor, credibility and wealth and left as a cautionary warning of how deeply steeped in rot and decay the DPWH truly is!