The collapse on April 26 of a footbridge at a housing project in Zamboanga City, with various officials dropping along with it into the murky water, would have been hilarious and an occasion for schadenfreude.
But it ceases to be funny when one realizes that the rickety footbridge fairly represents the state of the government’s housing projects.
The occasion was an inspection of a government housing project at Sitio Hongkong in Barangay Rio Hondo. Zamboanga City Rep. Celso Lobregat, Mayor Maria Isabelle Climaco-Salazar, and officials of the National Housing Authority (NHA) were escorting Negros Occidental Rep. Abelardo Benitez in a run-through of the project built in 2016 — at the cost of P53 million — for the benefit of 240 families who had survived the so-called Zamboanga siege in 2013.
A video of the incident has since gone viral: The bigwigs were walking on the wooden footbridge when it gave way; they were helped out of the waist-deep water by soldiers.
“Benitez and I were talking about the many issues we’ve noted about the place when suddenly, we heard loud cracks and I was the first to fall through,” Lobregat said.
Benitez, who chairs the House committee on housing and urban development, was not amused.
“This was the first time in my search for substandard projects that I encountered such an experience,” he was reported as saying in the course of railing against those behind the project.
He added that the people might have been “spared by the calamity, the human disaster, only to become victims of poor housing design and materials.”
The urban poor group Kalipunan ng Damayang Mahihirap, or Kadamay, was quick to take note that what seemed like slapstick served the officials right.
“NHA officials seem to have gotten a taste of their own medicine as they experienced firsthand the perils in government housing sites,” the group said in a statement.
It also pointed out that the NHA’s task is “to ensure that communities are safe, livable and sustainable.”
Kadamay became a byword when its members, former residents of Metro Manila, took over six housing projects in the town of Pandi and the City of San Jose del Monte in Bulacan in March 2017.
The Kadamay members forcibly occupied 5,262 low-cost housing units, of which 1,983 had been intended for families of members of the uniformed services, despite the fact that neither water nor electricity was available.
The occupation drew attention to the plight of the urban homeless, as well as the performance of the NHA and the problems plaguing it.
The NHA, which is mandated to provide shelter for 2.5 homeless Filipinos, has long been the object of criticism for delays, cost overruns, and even corruption.
In 2015, it was found that only 4,651 were occupied of the 57,494 housing units built at a cost of P11.3 billion for soldiers, policemen, firemen and jail guards.
Among the reasons given were that these units were located in the middle of nowhere, were badly built, and had no suitable connections to water and electricity sources.
The NHA also failed to build thousands of housing units for the survivors of Supertyphoon “Yolanda,” and even had trouble getting the completed units occupied.
In northern Cebu, for example, it sought to build 22,423 units but by November 2017, only 188 were considered ready for occupancy—and of these only 108 were actually occupied.
In Tacloban City, more than 4,000 families still await their units. The story is the same throughout the hard-hit Western Visayas.
Benitez himself led the subsequent investigation of an Eastern Samar contractor for using substandard materials in the construction of Yolanda housing units.
The NHA is also parrying brickbats for the slipshod construction of resettlement projects for survivors of Typhoons “Pablo” and “Sendong.”
Apart from serving as a metaphor for the state of the government’s housing projects, the footbridge that fell down is a splash of water in the face of housing officials.
NHA General Manager Marcelino P. Escalada Jr. has ordered a fact-finding body to look into the integrity of the housing project in Zamboanga City, according to Elsie Trinidad, the agency’s spokesperson.
Trinidad also said the NHA was not solely to blame for the collapsed footbridge: “The NHA’s focus has been on the housing units, and, admittedly, we may have lacked closer coordination with other agencies in charge of other components of housing, such as access roads and bridges and electricity.”
The damning question arises yet again: Who’s in charge?