“At a time when the administration is juggling serious national issues, the last thing it needs is another photo-op dressed as reform”
AFTER Saturday’s column piece on the procurement sheet of flame at DICT, my phone started ringing again – this time from senior IT professionals who have spent decades building real systems, not press releases.
They weren’t calling about procurement anymore.
They wanted to flag yet another PR production under Henry Aguda’s watch: the so-called “Transparency Portals.”
Some were laughing, disgusted, others were exasperated, but all were united in their assessment – this portal is nothing more than a glossy website masquerading as reform.
Yes, the website is up – but IT experts cannot be fooled — it is a not a transparency portal at all. It has pages labeled “Financials,” “Governance & Compliance,” “Claims & Coverage,” and even a neat note saying when it was “last updated.”
Anyone who doesn’t work in IT might think this already means transparency.
But when IT experts tried to actually use the portal the way a real transparency platform should be used – to check the numbers, trace the details, or download information – they quickly discovered that the site doesn’t allow any of that.
You can’t download the data.
No list of projects and contract price.
No list of contractors and project statuses.
You can’t get the raw files, not download data.
You can’t check how public money was really spent.
The site shows colorful graphs and just summaries, but it does not give the actual, detailed information behind those charts.
There are no records you can download, no lists of where the money went, no documents showing contracts, expenses, or transactions.
Without these, a “transparency portal” becomes just a drama and display – not a tool that lets the public verify anything. The structure is there; the substance is not.
What DICT launched is not transparency. It’s presentation.
The “Governance & Compliance” section — which should contain important documents like audit findings and resolutions – shows none of these materials.
The “Public Engagement” section – which they advertised as a way for citizens to give feedback – shows no complaints and no responses.
The page is built, but nothing is inside.
Senior IT professionals told me this is a pattern they have seen in Aguda’s projects: pretentious and misrepresentations — hollow and weak simple websites but called “Transparency Portals.”
And this is where many IT veterans drew a sharper comparison: the Transparency Portal is shaping up to be “another Cyberdome” – the same style of sweeping claims, dramatic staging, and grand labels attached to systems that are either unfinished or non-functional.
Like Cyberdome, the portal is being sold as a breakthrough.
And like Cyberdome, the underlying system – the part that determines whether it actually works – remains hollow.
IT professionals say the pattern is identical: take an incomplete product, give it a grandiose name, launch it with fanfare, and hope the optics drown out the lack of real functionality.
Cyberdome was marketed as a cybersecurity fortress; the Transparency Portal is marketed as a reform tool.
Both, the experts say, are PR stunts dressed in technical language.
Veterans in the tech community say the pattern is becoming too obvious to ignore: big launch, big language, big props – but thin content.
One longtime open-data advocate put it plainly: “Ano tingin nila sa IT community, bobo? (Do they think those in the IT community are moronic?) If we can’t download the actual numbers, it’s not transparency. It’s a brochure with a URL.”
This is the real problem: PR stunts dressed as governance tools erode trust in the very reforms they claim to champion.
The IT community does not see innovation here – they see another attempt to sell optics as substance. What Aguda sees as optics, the IT sector sees as farce.
By overselling a hollow platform as a breakthrough, Aguda is not strengthening digital governance – he is making himself, and by extension the DICT, the punchline in rooms that used to root for government modernization.
Worse, he risks dragging the President’s name into every one of these staged unveilings launched under his watch.
At a time when the administration is juggling serious national issues, the last thing it needs is another photo-op dressed as reform.
So the question quietly spreading across the tech sector is this: Is Henry Aguda becoming a liability to President Marcos – using PR to compensate for systems that do not deliver?
