OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT
Diwa C. Guinigundo
It was just a few days after Typhoon Yolanda pummeled most of the central Philippines in November 2013 that we appeared before CNN in New York in the course of the Republic’s global fund-raising exercise. We updated the world about the damage we sustained from Yolanda and our relief efforts. The global community responded with extraordinarily quick support for the Philippines. The world was aghast at our state of national calamity.
Yolanda was a super typhoon. Thousands died from this disaster that the government ceased counting. Even after several months, more bodies continued to be found from the mountains of debris and soil, some were seen floating near the San Juanico Bridge. More than a thousand remain missing. Some estimates of the damage put it at nearly $3 billion or some ₱150 billion.
What was equally sad is that we don’t seem to see evidence that we learned from that traumatic experience of nine years ago. The Duterte administration itself observed that the government’s housing program remained provisional. The planned restricted areas from the shores of Tacloban were simply dismissed. Most damning is the general perception that some quarters pocketed the foreign funds donated to the Filipino people.
It was good that the government in 2013 formed FAiTh or the Foreign Aid Transparency Hub to promote full disclosure by showing the details of each country and international organization’s donations as notified to the government. In less than a month, no less than 55 countries sent aid in cash, relief goods, medical missions, rapid response teams and a host of other forms of assistance. If we are not aware, both warring Russia and Ukraine joined hands to support us in our worst of times.
Two years after Yolanda, the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) reported that the donations coursed through it funded transitional shelter program, cash for work, ready-to-eat food items and medicines. As of that date, DSWD disclosed that some ₱73 billion foreign aid was pledged, of which ₱45 billion were in cash and ₱28 billion were non-cash. Of that amount, only ₱17 billion materialized, of which ₱1.202 billion consisted of cash, and ₱1.269 came in kind. At the time of reporting, DSWD had disbursed 84 percent of the donations.
Here’s the catch: the remaining ₱14 billion went to NGOs and multilateral organizations, among others. The donors appeared to trust NGOs and multilateral organizations more than the public sector. Why this preference for coursing their assistance through these private entities?
Take it from the Commission on Audit (COA) which in 2014 released its audit report of Typhoon Yolanda Relief Operations covering the one-year State of National Calamity. COA accounted only for those donations distributed to government agencies but not those coursed through local government units and other private organizations.
COA found that the government did not immediately provide the budget for Yolanda victims. The Office of Civil Defense, for instance, used its own funds courtesy of donations both from local and foreign sources. As of that date, COA also observed that financial assistance was given to the family of only one deceased victim. One reason for this bottleneck could have been the tedious paper work required to establish eligibility for public assistance.
COA also admitted that the processes are not adequate for confirming that donations received are all accounted for. With the varied sources of funds, majority of which were not coursed through public agencies, “there was no way to track the flow of aid.”
In short, public relief assistance was not enough, it was slow in coming and seamless monitoring could not be done. Accountability was impossible to establish. For this, President Noynoy Aquino declared in March 2014, “I apologize if we could not act even faster.”
It’s not surprising that in the Philippines, we have a dynamic NGO sector with reported 60,000 registered aid groups, mostly focused on promoting specific interests. When the Duterte administration last year required all international aid for NGOs to clear with the foreign affairs department to prevent terrorist financing, some NGOs naturally took issue with the directive.
For instance, Milwida Guevarra, former finance undersecretary and head of Synergia Foundation aimed at helping improve the quality of basic education, argued that the regulatory framework for NGOs was already in place, and so: “Why can’t they make the system work instead of making it very hard for NGOs who are doing many of the functions this government should be doing?”
What could further weaken trust in government is when its own agencies involved in disaster mitigation champion different data and recommendations.
In the aftermath of Typhoon Paeng over the weekend, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) cited about a hundred deaths, and still growing, and over two million affected in 17 regions. Over 53,000 farmers and 58,000 hectares of crops were affected. So far, some ₱2 billion worth of infrastructure has been reported damaged with over 120 landslides in both the Visayas and Mindanao. Flooding washed away lives and livelihood in northern Luzon. For these reasons, NDRRMC recommended to place the Philippines under a state of calamity to allow the immediate use of calamity funds and timely control of consumer prices.
But in his consultation with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), a member of NDRRMC, President Bongbong Marcos decided that “I don’t think it’s necessary” to declare it because “the damage was not extensive, and was highly localized.”
What kind of signal are we sending to donor organizations? We should not expect a reduction in private sector efforts to bypass official channels for mitigating disasters. And we have not begun auditing our disaster mitigating efforts yet.