Maharlika Highway: When a Public Road Turns Drama

When DPWH Secretary Vince Dizon agreed to ride a bus from Manila to Naga City to experience firsthand the lubak-lubak reality of our roads, my first reaction was relief—relief that, at last, someone in power might be forced to confront what Bicolanos have long endured. Every pothole jolted the spine; every delay was measured not in minutes but in body aches.

Coming as it did in the middle of a public works scandal and ongoing congressional investigations, however, the optics were impossible to miss. Credit grabbers surfaced, defenders mobilized, and with 2028 quietly looming, no one could plausibly claim the gesture was politically neutral—least of all in Camarines Sur, where roads have never been just roads.

For many Bicolanos like me, especially those who regularly travel through Camarines Sur, land travel remains a physical ordeal. This is not exaggeration. It is muscle memory. It is the stiffness that settles hours after the trip, the mental calculation of whether one can endure another overnight bus ride, the weary resignation captured in the phrase, “ganito talaga.”

The dare did not come from just anyone. It was issued by former Naga City mayor and now first-term Third District Congressman Nelson Legacion. Thus was born what quickly became known as the Legacion–Dizon road trip—an episode that dominated local conversations and briefly thrust our battered highway into national consciousness.

Ironically, it took this very spectacle to remind many—or inform some for the first time—that the Maharlika Highway in Camarines Sur is also officially called the Andaya Highway.

In 2018, Congress passed a law renaming a portion of the Maharlika Highway after Rolando “Nonoy” Andaya Jr., former congressman, later Budget Secretary, and one of the most influential political figures in the province from the 1990s to the 2010s. The act followed his death and reflected a familiar Philippine practice: memorializing politicians through public infrastructure. We have seen similar impulses before, including the controversial attempt to rename the Central Bicol State University of Agriculture after Luis Villafuerte Sr.

One cannot help but ask why long-serving congressmen so often succeed in attaching their family names to institutions built and maintained with public funds.

Legally, the road never stopped being Maharlika Highway. Administratively, it remains Route 1 or AH26, part of the Asian Highway Network. Socially—where meaning truly resides—it never changed at all.

Bus drivers still say “Maharlika.” Commuters still say “Maharlika.” The name lives on in transport routes, accident reports, and everyday directions. For ordinary travelers, the road never felt “new” enough to deserve a new name. It still floods, still bottlenecks, still turns long journeys into endurance tests. Maharlika was—and remains—forever lubak-lubak.

The renaming was controversial from the start. Coming in the same year as Andaya’s highly contentious death, many viewed it as premature and politicized, heavy with unresolved questions. Critics argued that the road predated Andaya by decades and carried national—not merely provincial—significance. Others warned that such acts blur the line between public service and personal legacy, reinforcing the dangerous idea that infrastructure is owned rather than shared.

This controversy cannot be separated from Camarines Sur’s long-running rivalry between two political dynasties: the Andayas and the Villafuertes.

This rivalry was never simply personal. It was structural—a decades-long contest for control of the province, fought through congressional districts, budget allocations, and access to national power. The Villafuertes built dominance through governorships, municipal machinery, and territorial control. The Andayas rose later but rapidly, drawing strength from Congress, national agencies, and above all, budgetary leverage from Manila.

It was a clash of machinery versus money, of ground power versus fiscal influence. In that struggle, roads—especially the Maharlika, now Andaya, Highway—became symbols of political ownership. Concrete turned into campaign material. Asphalt became legacy.

Seen in this light, the Legacion–Dizon bus ride was never just about potholes. It was about reclaiming narrative control over a road long politicized, renamed, claimed, and contested. It was governance staged as spectacle, accountability packaged as performance.

Yes, many of us will ride the bus to Naga again. But the road now carries more than traffic—it carries the accumulated weight of political theater. And for Bicolanos who have endured this highway for decades, the question remains painfully simple: when will the politics finally end—and the road finally get fixed?