MANILA, Philippines — President Rodrigo Duterte has denied that his ambitious multi-trillion-peso “Build, Build, Build” program was a failure.
Duterte slammed Senator Franklin Drilon, saying the opposition leader “does not know how to count.”
“Of course not. You can see for yourself,” the President pointed out in an exclusive interview aired Monday on GMA’s 24 Oras. “How many airports now you [can] travel around, look at Luzon, look at the stretch.”
“He does not really know how to count. If it’s a statement just in derision, we can’t do anything about that, that’s free. I said, well, people judge best when they condemn,” he added.
Drilon earlier said that Duterte’s “Build, Build, Build” program was a “dismal failure,” citing that only nine of the 75 flagship projects have started construction.
“We have only two years and a half years left of this administration, I don’t think any substantial progress in so far as the program is concerned will be achieved as I would repeat the execution is simply dismal,” the senator told reporters.
Vince Dizon, Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA) chief, said the government has revised its list of infrastructure flagship projects as it “shelved” at least 20 original big-ticket projects.
Dizon said that “there were some projects [on] that list that after the feasibility studies, they were found out to be not yet feasible now.”
The BCDA chief also admitted they are “not contented” with the progress of the flagship infrastructure projects.
“While we’ve already achieved a lot, we’re not contented; we’re not satisfied. We want to do even more,” he said.
Despite shelving some key infrastructure projects, presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo dismissed Drilon’s remarks as “baseless,” saying “not a single infrastructure was made” during the administration of former president Benigno S. Aquino III.