If you’ve been to Seoul, capital city of South Korea, as a tourist lately, one of the city attractions which the guides would proudly fill you in on is the scenic Cheonggyecheon Stream. It’s a clear blue stream about six kilometers flowing from west to east through downtown Seoul and flows directly into the Han River in the outskirts of the city.

The channel boasts of beautifully lit fountains, alongside which are promenades where city residents do their jogging and morning exercises. It is “home to the world’s largest ceramic- tile wall called the Wall of Hope, which decorates both sides of the stream, meant to express the people’s sorrow and grief over the north-south division of Korea.”

What the tour guides would inevitably tell you is that this waterway—where clear, blue water now flows and fishes thrive—had once deteriorated into a murky and putrid sinkhole, which our very own Pasig River has sadly become. “Following the Korean war, Cheonggyecheon became polluted and the areas around it became decimated and [degraded]. Then, a massive project to create a more beautiful and environmentally viable Seoul began. This waterway is now among the sparkling gems produced by that ambitious effort.”

A Filipino need not go too far abroad in Asia to find other enviable examples where the rivers are being watched over with loving care by the communities that benefit from such resources. Thailand is considered Asia’s regional leader in water resource management, particularly of river basins.

That’s because Thailand has shown to the world that only a community-based approach—not a top-to-bottom form of river management such as the Philippine government is practicing—is the only way our rivers and lakes can be successfully revived. But that’s Thailand, where the Ping River flows, and water has always been a vital part of the life of its people. “Water and people in Thailand are very closely related,” says the head of the Water Resources Association in that country, Dr. Apichart Anukulamrphai. That’s why, by the way, river festivals are major events in this part of Asia. Such festivals are a time to pay homage to the waterways, without which they would not survive, let alone progress.

Right here at home, it was only recently when the Belgian government generously agreed to provide the initial funding for a project to start cleaning up the Pasig River with a P1.12-billion loan (or some €17 million). The funding sparked a glimmer of hope that the government, through the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), would at last begin in earnest the long-overdue imperative to do something about what has become probably one of the most polluted rivers in the world.

Such hopes were further raised when multilateral sources of funding such as the Asian Development Bank also pledged to help the Philippines see the Pasig River rehabilitation project through.

The Pasig River as we now know it is nothing more than a putrid, malodorous sinkhole that—if I may add tongue-in-cheek—has given river pollution a bad name.

It once was an idyllic, 25-kilometer waterway connecting the Laguna de Bay (via the Napindan Channel) and the Manila Bay, with the Marikina and San Juan rivers as its major tributaries. The thick, chocolate-colored liquid that can only now creep (not flow) throughout its length are the witch’s brew that came out of all sorts of human waste and largely untreated industrial chemical discharges mindlessly dumped into it by the metropolis for nearly six decades.

But the funding for this Belgian-funded project, plus that forthcoming from multilateral agencies—according to an insider—may be in danger of being diverted for purposes other than that intended by the sponsors.

“The timing of this project couldn’t have come at a worse time,” says the insider, who can only speak in hushed tones. “It’s election time, you see, and certain politicians seem bent on controlling a chunk of the dredging funds for their own personal purposes. Knowing these people, you can be sure that something rotten is going on.”

I don’t know if Environment Secretary Joselito Atienza is aware of it, but there are indications that politicians have begun to muscle into the dredging project.

Right now, the head of the Pasig River Rehabilitation Commission is supposedly Deogracias Pablan Jr., who is executive director. But a DENR assistant secretary, said to be the son of a Southern Tagalog congressman, has allegedly practically eclipsed Pablan and taken over the project.

According to the insider, the first sure sign that mischief is afoot happened after May 25, when an article in a leading broadsheet gave a full account of what the Belgian government expected the DENR to accomplish on a 17-kilometer stretch of the waterway. It was a faithful account of Belgian government expectations based on the terms of the soft-loan contract.

The day after the article came out, the entire Public Information and Advocacy Group (PIAG), composed of eight communications specialists, which was to help oversee the dredging project, was sacked on orders of the assistant secretary.

The 17-kilometer stretch referred to in the article has become too shallow and needed to be rid of tons of silt, organic materials, contaminated substances and harmful effluents of all kinds.

Approximately 2.8 million metric tons of silt would have to be dredged out of that particular waterway stretch at a cost of P5.4 billion, assuming the cost of dredging would be at P1,912.12 per cubic meter. But this cost would not cover expenses for “phytoremediation” and “”bioremediation,” procedures to treat the waste before it is finally stowed away in underwater dumps—a newfangled way of waste disposal.

The Belgian government is especially keen on the phytoremediation and bioremediation aspects of the project because (as the insider explains) the kind of silt now embedded in the bottom of the Pasig contains heavy metals and other toxic solids. The Belgian funders would want to see these “bio” remedies—which would make up 30 percent to 40 percent of the cost—as provided for in the loan contract.

Apparently, all the members of the PIAG staff were unceremoniously fired because the newspaper article—which was attributed to them—highlighted the Belgian requirements. By implication, the DENR officials in charge of the project are getting ready to cut corners by ignoring the new fail-safe technologies prescribed by the Belgians.

In other words, the devil-may-care DENR officials intend to merely dump the silt dredged from the Pasig into the open sea and save a big chunk of the funds intended for the project.

Which gives rise to such questions as “save” the funds for whom (?); and, finally, wouldn’t such a move defeat the very purpose of the project, which is to put back the Pasig River in sync with the global environment?

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