Duterte’s ‘Yolanda’

The Marawi tragedy is fast shaping up to be President Duterte’s “Yolanda,” that shorthand for the perceived government incompetence in the 2013 supertyphoon’s aftermath that became one of the biggest debacles of President Benigno Aquino III’s administration.

Aquino’s Yolanda speaks of the bureaucratic gridlock and precious scant foresight that hampered what should have been a swift and methodical emergency response in the face of crisis. Early warnings had been made that Yolanda was unlike anything seen before—the most powerful storm in recorded history at the time. But the unorthodox, butt-on-fire response a calamity of that magnitude required was nowhere to be felt in the immediate days, as Aquino’s Malacañang grappled with what was widely seen as top-level indecision, incoherence and incoordination in the race to save lives and bring relief to survivors. Though the Commission on Audit (COA) has settled lingering questions on the Yolanda funds, much head-shaking remains on what has become a textbook case of disastrously missed opportunities.

As with Yolanda, Marawi is bound to be emblematic of the administration under which it happened. Like Aquino, President Duterte will be dogged by doubts, questions and suspicions over the Marawi fiasco—from the oversights and intelligence failures that led to the city becoming a terrifying battleground for hardline Islamic terrorists, to the promised rehabilitation that, two years after the siege, has yet to be started.

The President has always flaunted his blood ties to the Moro people. In an event in Marawi in May 2018, he said his grandchildren have Moro blood because his grandmother—the mother of his late mother, Soledad—was a Maranao.

Why, then, did he practically invite Maute terrorists to lay waste to Mindanao’s showpiece Maranao city with his needless taunt on Dec. 12, 2016, when, to reports that Maute fighters had threatened to attack Marawi, he said: “Go ahead, be my guest. We will wait for you there”? And why, with intelligence already present that an attack was imminent, did the President bring his entire national security team, including top military officials, to Moscow in May 2017 for an official visit, catching them all unaware when the siege began?

The Marawi battle, which raged for five months and ended in October 2017, left over a thousand people dead and over P18 billion worth of damage to the city. Two years later, why are some 100,000 Merawan (Marawi natives), per the count of the International Committee of the Red Cross’ delegation head Martin Thalmann, still languishing in tattered tents and squalid refugee sites? Why is the city’s once bustling trade center still buried in rubble, and the locals prevented from returning to their homes and communities?

According to Secretary Eduardo del Rosario, who chairs Task Force Bangon Marawi, the P10-billion rebuilding fund earmarked for Marawi has paid out P5.624 billion, leaving a balance of P4.375 billion. Based on figures released this year by the Department of Finance, nearly P42 billion was also raised from foreign pledges, donations, grants and loans. So what’s behind the inordinate delay in Marawi’s rebuilding? Why are its residents still dispossessed, and their shattered city still in ruins?

Many locals have expressed alarm and frustration at the rebuilding plans touted so far. Not only were they barely consulted on these plans, residents complain; why, they ask, with the city’s population bereft and jobless, must the government negotiate with state-owned Chinese companies for the reconstruction projects, which are bound to bring in Chinese workers? Two of the contracted firms, the China State Construction Engineering Corp. Ltd. and the China Geo-Engineering Corp., even come with dubious records; they were blacklisted by the World Bank in 2009, for allegedly conspiring with Philippine companies to rig the bidding of road projects partly financed by the international lender.

In remarks in April this year that drew outrage, the President essentially blamed Marawi residents for the cataclysm that befell their city. Because the locals were supposedly loose on crime and drugs that let the terrorists in (never mind the administration’s P2.5-billion intelligence funds in 2017, per the COA), “the Marawi crisis was a man-made calamity,” said Mr. Duterte.

It could well be. If Marawi’s reconstruction is botched and no serious accountability is extracted for what happened to the city, then the man in Malacañang bears ultimate responsibility. It will be his legacy. As with Aquino’s Yolanda, so with Duterte’s Marawi.