National Irrigation Administration (NIA) acting chief Eduardo Guillen has admitted to senators that there was indeed corruption within the agency.

This as the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee, on Thursday, August 24 grilled the NIA over the hundreds of unfinished and substandard irrigation projects all over the country, which caused a wastage of billions worth of government funds.

Senators Raffy Tulfo and Francis Tolentino quizzes National Irrigation Administration (NIA) officials on hundreds of unfinished irrigation projects all over the country, causing wastage of billions of government funds. (Senate PRIB Photo)

Sen. Raffy Tulfo, who sought a Senate probe into the matter during one of his privilege speech, said the numerous anomalous NIA projects is one of the main reasons why farmers have a hard time increasing their yield.

According to Tulfo, NIA has numerous pending irrigation projects that spanned years and are still uncompleted.

Public biddings were also reportedly rigged in favor of contractors and the agency paid contractors even before their projects were completed.

“As of June 2022, only 65.28 percent of the 3,128,000 hectares of total irrigational areas in the Philippines are irrigated and only 38 of the 80 target provinces and chartered cities have received agricultural machineries, equipment facilities and small scale irrigation projects,” Tulfo said during the hearing.

Asked if he believes there is corruption in NIA, Guillen replied that “all organizations have a certain level of corruption.”

But Tulfo told Guillen not to involve other organizations and reminded him that the subject of the Senate’s investigation at hand is NIA.

“I’m just talking about NIA. Let’s accept it. The only time you can solve a corruption problem in your agency that you handle, is to accept that there is corruption,” said Tulfo.

“If you don’t accept that there is corruption, how can you solve that corruption problem? Denial is not the right answer,” the senator pointed out.

At this point, Guillen tried to rephrase his answer by admitting “there were lapses” but was told by senators not to sugarcoat his answers.

This prompted the NIA chief to then say “yes. Which is why we are trying to fix the system.”

To this, Tulfo told Guillen to address the problem at hand immediately, as he finds it “unacceptable” to imply that the problems on these irrigation projects were mere “lapses.”

Also during the hearing, the NIA officials claim that issues such as the relocation of indigenous peoples living in the construction sites and road right of way, among others, contributed to the reasons why the projects could not be completed.

The agency also cited Executive Order No. 138, issued by then President Rodrigo Duterte in June 2021 that authorized devolving some of the functions and projects of the Executive department to the local government units (LGUs).

Sen. Francis Tolentino, chairman of the blue ribbon panel, however, urged the NIA to submit to the committee copies of these documents.

“We need more documents to enable us to reach into a conclusion that there are indeed irregularities in irrigation projects,” Tolentino said.

But he finds it a good start for Guillen to be “very frank, honest and fortright” in his responses to the panel, “having been there just for a few months.”