The thousands dead and missing in the floodwaters, the infants and children torn from their parents’ grip and killed in an instant, the mothers and fathers whose bodies were found in a garbage dump after a mournful search, the spouses, siblings and other family members now gone for all time—these should be enough to indict Cagayan de Oro Mayor Vicente Emano.
But there’s more to damn him as the days wear on from those dreadful hours of Dec. 16-17, the days inexorably dawning even as life as they knew it has clearly ended for the survivors: the wrecked and lost homes, the ravaged memories, the vanished livelihoods. And, with schools opening as scheduled after the Christmas holidays—the better, according to authorities, for the living to wrench themselves from grief and begin to move on—the students now forever “absent.”
There has to be a time of reckoning for Emano, and perhaps the planned lawsuits and congressional investigations will start the process. The long-time mayor may be, as he has claimed in a recent press statement, “fast-tracking” the development of a 9-hectare relocation site for displaced city residents, but the question of how they came to live a perilous existence on what has been described as a mere “bar of silt and sand,” in the first place, has to be confronted and answered. Let that serve as the starting point. The angle on the “complacency” of both officials and residents that supposedly allowed the death toll to climb to such tragic heights has outlived its convenience.
It’s time to come to grips with the burgeoning of informal settlers in Cagayan de Oro (a tried and tested tactic for folksy officials who need a steady well of votes and a wall of support in elections) and to reexamine the resettlement program unabashedly touted as pro-poor, under which land was purchased by the city government for hundreds of millions of pesos and then sold by lots for P1 (hence the catchy tagline “Piso-Piso”). In the course of taking a second look at what the city has become, perhaps the urban sprawl cheek by jowl with rural conditions will provide a clear picture of how a political dynasty grown accustomed to the ways of wealth and power can easily run governance to the ground.
With the examination of the lay of the land, the next logical subject is the city government’s reaction, or lack of it, to the warnings aired not only by weathermen but also the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council on the potential destructiveness of Tropical Storm “Sendong.” Emano is reported to have disclaimed knowledge that the storm was well on its way. If true, then he was caught flat-footed by the deluge, suggesting how totally out of things the man is and has been, as his critics claim. With that suggestion, it’s not too big a leap to get to the gambling story.
A report from Inquirer contributors claims that, despite the mayor’s protestations, the story refuses to die—of how he sat riveted at an online gambling station even after being told of the Cagayan River’s overflow and the startlingly swift progress of the flood, and of how he bestirred himself only after a member of his security detail sought permission to leave in order to save family members from the raging waters. It’s all of a piece with the loud demand constantly posed the day after that long night: Where was Emano?
And where was he in the succeeding days when, to borrow from the poet, things fell apart, the center refused to hold, and “the blood-dimmed tide [was] loosed” on the land? Emano was nowhere to be seen in the frenzied aftermath, and leadership by the city government was so lacking that a man of the cloth, Archbishop Antonio Ledesma, had to take control of the situation. Ledesma convened a multisectoral initiative to fill the yawning gap created by the mayor’s literal and figurative absence, thus providing a rudder, as it were, for the floundering city.
Indeed, there is enough to damn the man who has lorded it over the “golden” city for more than a decade. The corpses in the garbage dump are sufficiently eloquent. But on TV, a young woman with a faraway gaze and an overwhelming guilt at losing her child said it best. I was unable to save him, she said, her voice hinting of tears that she would not let fall. I have this second life, but of what use is it when we are no longer complete?