Where is the P10 billion allocated as the government’s “Calamity Assistance and Rehabilitation Effort” fund under the General Appropriations Act?

From an editorial in today's Philippine Daily Inquirer titled Seize the Moment.

According to reports, families in certain stricken areas have yet to experience any form of official assistance, and extensive swaths of Bulacan and Pampanga provinces, to speak nothing of cities, towns and barangays, continue to be inundated. Makeshift evacuation centers are bursting at the seams and have predictably transformed into sanitation nightmares. Private groups and businesses have taken up the duty of providing aid and relief—an extension of the uncommon valor exhibited by ordinary people in saving many lives, to the extent of losing their own.

And yet, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo declared on Tuesday that “we’re already at the cleaning stage.”

Ang bilis ah!


A sterling example of the inutile workings of the administration virtually screams to be noted in the National Relief Operations Center that the President had earlier ordered set up in Malacañang. It was clearly intended as a dramatic gesture—a flinging open of the Palace gates to the suffering horde—and an attempt to offset the image of an administration sufficiently indifferent as to dine lavishly in New York while Maguindanao, or at least parts of it, burns. (What was it a Malacañang mouthpiece said then? That the President can’t be expected to chow down on a hotdog in Central Park, or something to that effect?)

Napaka special ba nang bituka niya kaya hindi pwede nang hotdog? Oh wait, marami palang preservatives yun, delikado nga naman pala.


By accounts, the President was instantly on annoyance mode on Tuesday when she saw a ragged mass of people waiting outside the Palace gates, and ordered that they be allowed to enter. Imagine what went on in the mind of the elderly man on a wheelchair when, at the end of the winding queue at the National Relief Operations Center, he was handed hamburger buns. It was yet another indicator of how badly served the President is by her lieutenants, who apparently cannot be depended on to project her desired image as a leader sensitive to her constituents and quick to take the majesty and ministrations of her Palace to the level of their needs.

Lagi na lang annoyed.


Those hours of terror, when lives literally hung on the balance, now past, it behooves this administration to seize the moment and prove its worth. Having sought aid from the global community, it should guarantee transparent accounting and judicious distribution of donations.

And it could answer the question posed by the Samahang Operasyong Sagip, a disaster response initiative of various health organizations: Where is the P10 billion allocated as the government’s “Calamity Assistance and Rehabilitation Effort” fund under the General Appropriations Act?

What happened to the P10 Billion!?!