“No country can progress if its politics is more profitable than its industries. In a country where those in government are richer than entrepreneurs, they manufacture poverty.” — Peter Obi, Nigerian politician

I came across that line last year. It has not left me since.

We are a long way from Nigeria. Yet Obi could just as easily have been describing us. When politics is more profitable than industry, the damage does not stay inside the halls of government. It reaches the barangay. It reaches the dinner table. And lately, it reaches the roofline of houses that flood every rainy season.

The Water Keeps Rising, and So Do the Questions

Since the flood control mess broke open, the typhoons have kept coming. The floods have not eased. If anything, they arrive faster and sit longer.

That timing is cruel, but it is also clarifying. It has turned an accounting scandal into something people can see from their own windows.

What is being exposed is the alleged theft of billions of pesos meant for dikes, dams, and drainage. These are not vanity projects. They are the physical defenses that stand between our communities and a climate that is no longer behaving the way it once did. Every peso diverted from a floodwall is a peso subtracted from someone’s survival.

Where the Real Profits Are Being Made

Then come the headlines about the lifestyles.

You know the ones. A well-connected contractor here, a government family there, and a parade of assets that no honest public salary could ever explain. Meanwhile, the people they swore to serve are wading through chest-deep water, hauling appliances to the second floor, counting what is left.

Put those two pictures side by side and you learn everything you need to know about where the real profits in this country are being made.

That is what makes the blood boil. Not just the scale of the alleged theft, but the arithmetic behind it. Someone did well out of a disaster that other people barely survived.

The People Who Should Be Getting Rich

In a healthy economy, the largest rewards go to the people who create real value.

The entrepreneur who opens a plant and meets a payroll. The farmer who feeds the rest of us. The founder who builds something that did not exist last year. These are hard, uncertain, capital-hungry ways to make money. They are also the ways that leave a country better off than they found it.

Now compare that to the alternative. Kickbacks. Padded contracts. Ghost projects. Public funds quietly redirected into private accounts. No risk, no product, no jobs created, and a far better return.

When the second path pays more reliably than the first, talent follows the money. Ambition reorganizes itself around access instead of enterprise. That is how a country ends up with a political class wealthier than its productive class.

And that is precisely Obi’s point. A system like that does not merely tolerate poverty. It manufactures it.

Changing What We Reward

So the question in front of us is bigger than accountability for what already happened, important as that is.

The deeper question is what we reward. Right now, our incentives are pointed the wrong way. We have made proximity to public funds more lucrative than productivity, and then we act surprised when the smartest operators in the room behave exactly as the incentives instruct them to.

Shifting that balance means treating public service as a calling rather than a business model. It means procurement that can withstand daylight. It means consequences that actually land, on principals and not just on the errand boys. It means an electorate that stops accepting a plausible story about where the money went.

None of this is easy. I know how that paragraph reads: a wish list written by someone who has watched enough election cycles to know better.

Why I Still Think It Matters

Here is the thing, though. The alternative to demanding change is waiting for it, and waiting has a cost we can now measure in water damage.

If nothing shifts, we are simply laying the groundwork for the next scandal, the next flood, and the next round of manufactured poverty. The cast will change. The script will not.

So we keep asking. We keep the pressure on long after the news cycle has moved along, because outrage that expires in a week is the cheapest thing in the world to outlast.

Public service should never be a path to obscene wealth. Until that stops being a controversial thing to say out loud, we have work to do.

EMAIL: nicgabjr@gmail.com       X:@nicgabunada