Damaged goods

By Manila Standard Today

MUCH as the pork barrel scandal demolished the credibility of Congress, typhoon Yolanda has rocked the foundation of the presidency, leaving in its wake the lingering stench of official ineptitude, criminal neglect and incredible insensitivity.

In interview after interview, President Benigno Aquino III and his Cabinet members have put the onus on the local governments in the typhoon-battered provinces of Leyte and Samar, saying that their inability to respond quickly had hampered relief operations. They acknowledged that many of the local government employees had themselves been victims, but failed miserably to act on this knowledge.

Five full days after typhoon Yolanda laid waste to the Visayan provinces, we felt both pity and outrage at the sight of elderly women wiping tears and rain from their weathered faces as they waited outside the flattened Tacloban City airport, with not even a tent to protect them from the elements. We also saw on our television screens bodies that littered the city streets, uncollected after five days, and we learned of the absence of feeding centers to take care of the hunger-wracked survivors.

As we watched the heartbreaking footage, we also saw President Benigno Aquino III telling CNN that “we have been able to demonstrate as a government and as a people collectively that we take care of each other. And that the government’s immediate response... has been reassuring to the vast majority of our people.”

Disaster officials gave all sorts of excuses to explain their slow response.

There were not enough body bags, they said, even as the President reassured CNN that original estimates of 10,000 deaths were much too high, and that the final figure would probably be closer to 2,500. By Saturday, however, the official death toll has shot past 3,600 and was likely to go higher as the collection of cadavers begins in earnest.

All the tents were in Bohol after the massive earthquake there, other officials said, even as the Palace assured us that we had enough resources to cope with the disaster. There is more than a kernel of truth in that claim, but clearly nobody acted upon it. As commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, the President could have immediately dispatched thousands of troops to set up tents—we assume the Army has an adequate supply of these—to temporarily shelter the suffering typhoon survivors.

In a ghoulish twist, we also saw what appeared to be an effort to play down the death toll, with reports that figures from the Office of Civil Defense mysteriously being lowered.

In his interview with CNN, Mr. Aquino was asked to react to the fact that his presidency would be defined by the government response to the terrible devastation.

He responded by pointing to the government’s record in provinces that were not hit as badly as Leyte and Samar and completely sidestepped its utter failure in those two critical areas.

There were many casualties as a result of Typhoon Yolanda. The President’s credibility was clearly one of them. 

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