Politicized

If this story, running hot through the grapevine, is true, pity the people of Tacloban.

During last week’s Cabinet meeting, rehabilitation czar Panfilo Lacson reportedly pressed President Aquino to sign the master plan for rebuilding the Yolanda-hit areas. If the master plan is not signed before the anniversary of the great storm, people will be angry.

Without that master plan, and the funding to back it up, the rehabilitation effort will not be palpable on the ground. For instance, of the 116 kilometers of road that need urgent repair, only 60 kilometers have been attended to.

Lacson’s insistence apparently ticked President Aquino the wrong way. Tacloban, it seems, is such an uninteresting topic for the President. Aquino called for a 10-minute break (which usually happens when he needs to smoke). After the break, many other topics were discussed — except the pressing matter about the master plan for the Yolanda-hit areas.

In two weeks, it shall be a year since the great storm hit Samar and Leyte. To date, no master plan (let alone a budget) for rehabilitation has been signed. Without a master plan, all efforts for the physical rehabilitation of the devastated areas will be delayed.

Not even the forthcoming visit of Pope Francis to the Yolanda-hit areas seems sufficient incentive for the national leadership to act more quickly for the sake of the victims. It is nearly certain that when the Pope visits, he will find the devastated areas hardly alleviated.

What hampers prompt and effective response from national government are narrow partisan considerations.

Mar Roxas said it all a day after the storm left. He demanded the resignation of the Tacloban mayor, saying that he is a Romualdez and the President is an Aquino.  Why that should at all be an issue, only Roxas’ obsessively partisan mind could divine.

At any rate, those unfortunate remarks defined the Aquino administration’s attitude towards the devastated city. When Aquino finally visited the calamity zone, he blamed the tragedy entirely on the local officials — never mind that those local officials were themselves victims of the typhoon.

Since Roxas’ and Aquino’s remarks in the fateful days after the typhoon struck, it seems the national government’s attitude towards Tacloban has been studied neglect.

Instead of taking a hands-on attitude towards helping a heavily devastated region, Aquino (and Roxas) always seemed aloof to the plight of the Yolanda victims. They did not visit intermittently to check on the progress of the rehabilitation. They never bothered to see if anything could be done faster to diminish the misery.

What Aquino did was to pluck a retired senator, Lacson, to oversee the reconstruction effort. Lacson was given very little wherewithal to deal with the great humanitarian crisis. All he had was a small staff and no infra budget. He was, after all, simply tasked with “coordination.”

It was as if Lacson was given that thankless job to keep him away from the constant political positioning in Manila. Tacloban was to be his purgatory. He can never emerge from this assignment a hero who might threaten the designs of the factions cornering Aquino’s endorsement of a successor.

If the anniversary of Yolanda comes and no master plan is signed, Lacson should resign his post in protest. Politicking has taken the better of humanitarian considerations.

Unprepared

The law that created the NDRRMC assigns the DILG Secretary the role of vice-chairman for disaster preparedness.

Way before Yolanda struck, Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin, as NDRRMC chair, and Mar Roxas, as vice-chair for disaster preparedness, were in Tacloban. They warned the people of the possibility of storm surges.

Apparently, apart from issuing verbal warnings, they did nothing else. Not a single shoreline resident was evacuated. In the aftermath, thousands were killed by the surges.

No one was really prepared on the Tacloban side. Neither was anyone prepared in Manila. After days of talking up the perils Yolanda posed, the aftermath of the storm saw the NDRRMC unprepared to immediately dispatch a meaningful rescue and relief effort. The militaries of our neighboring countries were on the scene ahead of our own teams.

Apart from demanding the resignation of the Tacloban mayor, the only other thing Roxas might be remembered for is that incident where he clumsily tried to bluff a CNN journalist on live global TV. Asked why the bodies piling up along the streets were not being collected, Roxas insisted these were new bodies piled up.

Aquino, for his part, fired the regional police director in the middle of a crisis for estimating the casualties could run up to 10,000. When the casualty count eventually crawled to somewhere close to that instant estimate, the official count was stopped. To this day, we do not know exactly how many perished when Yolanda struck.

Bohol

Last week, on the anniversary of the Bohol quake, Mar Roxas found it opportune to scold the mayors of the devastated island for not submitting their reconstruction plans.

One Boholano mayor, presumably speaking on behalf of the whole lot, promptly scolded Roxas back. The mayor reminded the DILG secretary that while the check for the whole province was issued in June (already delayed by that time), the guidelines for how that money might be spent was made available only in August. Even then, the guidelines needed further clarification from technical personnel who were not on the ground.

Bohol is a severely devastated province. The guidelines for reconstruction ought to have been formulated November last year, not August this year.

To avert criticism for DILG’s slow-motion response, Roxas blamed the mayors (like he did in Tacloban). That ploy backfired.