Amiel Roldan blog

---  Title: Ghost Projects and the Specter of Accountability: Infrastructure Corruption and the Reimagination of Punitive Governance in the Philippines  Abstract:   This essay investigates the proliferation of ghost infrastructure projects in the Philippines, particularly within flood control programs, and the legislative momentum to reimpose the death penalty for corruption. Drawing from publicly available government reports, Senate proceedings, and civil society responses, it examines how infrastructural failure becomes a site of political contestation, moral outrage, and juridical recalibration. The ghost project phenomenon is situated within a broader postcolonial critique of state-building, economic sabotage, and the ethics of punitive governance.  ---  I. Introduction: Infrastructure as Spectacle and Spectre  Infrastructural development in the Philippines has long been positioned as a symbol of national progress and state capacity. Yet, recent re...

A refined version haiku cycle and lyrical poem, restructured into a scholarly poetic suite reminiscent of classical Southeast Asian literary forms and academic entries. This version draws from the cadence of dalít, tigsik, and panambitan, while integrating speculative cosmology, trauma-informed allegory, and postcolonial critique. Each section is titled and annotated, as if part of a curated manuscript or academic anthology.  ---  Memories of the Irretrievable: A Cosmological Poetics By Amiel Gerald A. Roldan   Translated and narrated in classical Tagalog style, with notes and summaries  ---  I. The Year the Deceased Was Born Annotation: This section marks the metaphysical rupture between calendrical time and ancestral memory. The "year of the dead" is not a historical marker but a mnemonic wound.  > That year the dead man was born—   > the day, month, and number   > is written in ashes.  ---  II. Choosing the Age...

---  “We Who Refuse the Grave”  That was the year   the dead were named by numbers—   a birthdate sealed in ash.   We did not mourn.   We rewrote the calendar   with hands unclaimed by blood.  Born again,   but not by womb or ritual—   we chose our own age.   Time bent for us,   not as mercy,   but as weapon.  The living asked:   must we follow the rites   of those already gone?   We answered:   no child, no grandchild,   no family to bind us.  We were young,   not by accident,   but by design.   No heirlooms,   no inheritance—   just breath and blade.  Desire for kin   was the first betrayal.   It made us dig graves   we never meant to fill.   So we refused   to raise the buried.  We did not want ...

THE MILITARY IN THE UNFOLDING DRAMA: A Nation on the Brink of Reckoning  In the Philippines' current socio-political landscape, the specter of institutional decay looms large. The nation finds itself entrenched in a precarious precipice—an intersection of endemic corruption, civic disillusionment, and the slow erosion of democratic norms. The essay "The Military in the Unfolding Drama" offers a compelling lens through which to examine this moment of reckoning, foregrounding the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and uniformed services not merely as passive observers, but as strategic actors in a volatile theater of governance. Their emerging role—marked by moral pronouncements, symbolic alignments, and tactical vigilance—signals a shift in the balance of power and a recalibration of national conscience.  This essay seeks to reflectively analyze the broader ills afflicting the Philippines, using the military's recent interventions as a premise to interrogate the fra...

Ghost Flood Control Projects in the Philippines: Anatomy of Corruption and Pathways to Reform   An Academic Essay in Actionable Parlay  ---  Introduction: The Specter Beneath the Waters  In a nation perennially battered by typhoons and monsoon rains, flood control infrastructure should be a lifeline. Yet in the Philippines, it has become a graveyard of ghost projects—phantom constructions that exist only on paper, siphoning billions from public coffers while leaving communities submerged in literal and figurative deluge. Between 2023 and 2025, the Department of Finance estimated that corruption in flood control projects cost the economy up to ₱118.5 billion, robbing Filipinos of over 200,000 potential jobs and stalling GDP growth. This essay interrogates the anatomy of these ghost projects, the systemic collusion that enables them, and proposes actionable reforms to dismantle the machinery of graft.  ---  The Political Economy of Kickbacks  At the...