THE nation remembered last week super-typhoon Yolanda which hit the country on November 8, 2013, with winds that hit 305 kilometers per hour, the most powerful typhoon in the whole world in 2013, one of the most powerful of all time.
Its massive storm surge, however, turned out to be more destructive, with waves that reached six meters high rushing inland, destroying homes and buildings that had escaped the powerful winds. The typhoon affected 44 provinces, damaged or destroyed 1.1 million houses, destroyed the livelihoods of 5.9 million workers, and killed over 6,000 people. Tacloban City in Leyte was 90 percent destroyed.
Presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo said that natural hazards are now the new normal as he paid tribute to all the agencies of government that helped the people all these years to rise from the tragedy. To this day, members of the Community of Yolanda Survivors and Partners in various provinces complain against the substandard housing the government built for the victims of typhoon Yolanda.
At about the same time that the Yolanda survivors were calling on the government to act on their still-unresolved housing and other problems, the people of another city – Marawi City in Lanao del Sur – complained that the rebuilding and rehabilitation of Marawi after it was attacked and occupied for five months by Islamic rebels in 2017 remains a big mess to this day.
The Marawi Reconstruction Conflict Watch (MRCW) said that at the hearing by the House Subcommittee on Marawi Rehabilitation last week, the government agencies concerned could not provide a clear accounting of a P5.52-billion fund that had been released by the government. Another P4 billion has not been released by the Department of Budget and Management, it said.
For the rehabilitation of Marawi, devastated by five months of fighting that ended in October, 2017, the government allocated P5 billion in 2017 and P10 billion from the National Disaster Risk Reduction Management Fund plus P5 billion from unprogrammed appropriations in the 2018 General Appropriations Act. The Philippines has also received international aid from several countries.
But now, according to the MRCW, government rehabilitation efforts appear to be in disarray. Some 200,000 Marawi residents need to be compensated, the MRCW said, along with many institutions such as schools and hospitals.
It is unfortunate that the problems in the rehabilitation of Yolanda’s victims in 2013 remain unresolved to this day – six years after the disaster. Officials of the new administration may rightly blame the previous administration, but after three years they should have made considerable progress in correcting the failings of the past.
As for the rehabilitation of Marawi, this should be an opportunity for the Duterte administration to demonstrate it can do much better than the previous administration in assisting victims of disasters – whether natural like Yolanda or man-made like the siege of Marawi.
