Lies about the scope of Yolanda rehab

I saw a news feature on ANC Prime Time Friday night that proved yet again that Noynoy Aquino lied in his State of the Nation Address. In his SONA last July 28, Noynoy boasted about how quickly the Philippines has recovered from supertyphoon Yolanda. Without any regard for the sensibilities of people in other nations, he even compared us with Haiti, bragging that what took that quake-devastated nation two years, it took us only eight months to get back on our feet.

ANC Prime Time feature the plight of the Tolosa National High School in Tolosa, Leyte. Not only can the school not yet hold classes due to unfinished repairs, but the repairs that have been done are the worst I have seen of any carpentry work. As the tv camera zoomed in on the roof, it can be clearly seen that many nails missed the wood they were to penetrate, leaving their sharp tips exposed dangerously.

I am not a carpenter and have not done any carpentry skills training. But I can boast without any equivocation that I can do a much better work with nails than whoever did the repairs on the Tolosa National High School. So where did Noynoy lie? He lied when he painted the picture that everything is now A-OK in the Yolanda-hit areas when in fact it is not.

To be sure, one school is not enough to paint a picture of total failure. But I have been there a few months after Yolanda and I have traveled the whole length of the highway between Ormoc City and Tacloban City. And I can say in all honesty that I have seen with my own eyes how not a single school along this 120-kilometer stretch has not been affected by the strongest typhoon on earth.

There were schools that have been completely destroyed and some suffering varying degrees of damage. But every single one of them needs complete reconstruction or urgent repairs. At the time I was there, I also did not see any work being done toward this end because much of the work was still about giving relief. Any work on rebuilding involved largely private dwelling but nothing involving schools.

Maybe this was because much of the assistance directed at schools were being provided by foreign and private relief organizations, none of whom, by the way, was ever mentioned by name in the SONA of Noynoy. While he took time out to thank certain individuals who need no thanking as they work for him, he neglected to find the time to mention individually the 30-plus countries without whose quick and efficient response we would still be floundering helplessly until now.

Noynoy lied in his SONA that everything is nearly back to normal in the devastated areas because it is not. Whoever provided him the information gave him the wrong data. Not that Noynoy could have cared less. After all, he really did not need to tell the truth but merely to justify his illegal hijacking of savings so he can amass money for his Disbursement Acceleration Program.

That is why he lied about the status of the reconstruction work after Yolanda. He has to paint a glowing picture of success, otherwise he would not be able to justify the hijacking of billions, an illegal act that he said was based on good intentions, among them the speeding up of the Yolanda reconstruction work. The problem is, that reconstruction work is not only slow, it is very shoddy as well.

No less than his fair-haired boy Panfilo Lacson, the so-called rehabilitation czar, himself proved Noynoy was lying, albeit unwittingly. Lacson is expected to seek an audience with Noynoy today, or at least within the next few days, to demand, among other things, more teeth to perform his duties. So what does that tell us? That he has not been able to do his duties, that's what. Why more teeth if everything was as smooth as Noynoy said everything was?

A few days before the SONA, Senator Alan Peter Cayetano also said something that was to belie what Noynoy would be saying in his SONA shortly thereafter. Cayetano, interviewed by media following a visit to Ormoc City, said the progress of the rehabilitation work was very slow and that there was so much that still needed to be done. He even said that things still have not gone much beyond relief work.

Let us go beyond the rehabilitation after Yolanda because it is very clear that Noynoy has not been truthful about the real situation. Let us focus on where the DAP money that should have speeded up the rehabilitation might have gone. After all, this was part of Noynoy's justification for the DAP, right? He had to hijack money from saving before they are legally savings so they can be poured into more urgent projects, among these the Yolanda rehabilitation.

But if there is little to show for it -- much of what can be seen on the ground in Leyte is courtesy of the foreign and private aid donors who, to this say, are still there doing humanitarian work -- where then could the money have gone? I don't know but I have my suspicions. And they jibe with the suspicion of others that the DAP was really secured for Noynoy's political interests and for his party's war chest, now that the elections are just around the corner.

By the way, the Tolosa National High School, which became the subject of an ANC Prime Time feature for the kind of work and the slow pace with which it was being done, is a big school in a big town, part of the Tacloban metropolitan area really. If things can go horribly wrong in such a big and well-situated school, think of what could be happening right now in the other devastated areas much farther from the scrutinizing eyes of media.

Even in Cebu, it is the big corporations that have taken up the cudgels for much of the reconstruction and rehabilitation work. Had government been doing what Noynoy claims it had been doing, there would have been little that these corporations could have done in the massiveness of the scale that they are doing right now. From the looks of it, much of the work anywhere has been done with only very little help from government.

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