More aid

At this moment, the Philippines is the one country that really stands alone with the highest of needs and the highest requirements.”

UN resident humanitarian coordinator Luizha Carvalho made that statement just last month, in the wake of the 7.2-magnitude earthquake that shook Bohol and neighboring provinces. The temblor left some 380,000 residents living in tents and requiring assistance for basic needs such as food, water, clothing, sanitation and health services.

The destruction wrought by “Yolanda” has added thousands more to the pool of survivors that need tending over the next months. This, while many survivors of previous calamities such as storms “Pablo” and “Sendong” have not been fully rehabilitated. The Department of Social Welfare and Development is seriously overstretched, and aid and relief are finite.

But now is not the time for the rest of the country, and friends of the Philippines in the international community, to come down with donor fatigue. More aid is needed, and all manner of assistance will be appreciated in this hour of multiple calamities. The government, however, must match the donors’ generosity with transparency and rigorousness in the use of relief money. Early this year, survivors of Pablo stormed the DSWD office to protest the alleged misuse of funds intended for the victims, and the inordinate delay in the release of rice to starving residents of affected areas. A city mayor was also called out two years ago by the Commission on Audit for having reportedly mismanaged relief funds for victims of Sendong. Any such similar controversies would be one too many to bear in the case of the Bohol quake and Yolanda’s follow-up whammy.