The main facts are uncontested, and uncomfortable. From Jan. 14, the day before Pope Francis arrived in the Philippines, to Jan. 19, the day he left, some 100 poor families were treated to an “outing” by the Department of Social Welfare and Development. In all, there were 490 men, women and children who took part in the DSWD “training camp” in Chateau Royale, a resort in Nasugbu, Batangas, and they had one thing in common: They were homeless people who lived on Roxas Boulevard.
Since Roxas Boulevard was one of the thoroughfares used by the papal motorcade, and since the schedule of the outing coincided exactly with the papal visit, the social welfare department has been asked the obvious question: Were they hiding the poor from the Pope?
A DSWD official said the timing was pure luck. “It was only a coincidence,” Assistant Secretary Javier Jimenez told Radyo Inquirer. “This has been planned even before [the papal visit].”
And Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman categorically denied there was any attempt to hide poor families. In the first place, she said, “You cannot hide poverty. When the Pope landed, the first thing he saw were the shanties by the river.”
From Malacañang, deputy presidential spokesperson Abigail Valte said no attempt to hide the poor would have even worked. “It would be an insult to our visitor to say that [if] we hide [the poor], he would not know about them.”
It does in fact seem unreasonable to expect that a government hosting the state and pastoral visit of a religious leader coming to the country precisely to be in solidarity with the poor, especially those victimized by Supertyphoon “Yolanda,” would launch an initiative to sweep the homeless under the rug, so to speak.
The main argument in the DSWD’s favor is that from simple arithmetic. To quote Jimenez: “I mean, there are more than that number of street families in Metro
Manila.” If the government really wanted to “whitewash poverty,” as a familiar and strident critic immediately alleged, why stop at 100 families?
But the arguments against the DSWD are numerous, and many of them proceed from basic questions.
First, timing. It may be that the department scheduled the activity beforehand, and that at least two such orientation outings had previously been conducted. Still: Why time the training program for Jan. 14 to 19? The schedule of the Pope’s visit was set several months ago; when did the DSWD decide to set the third outing for January? There’s also a little detail that nags at the conscience, even of those who would like to give Soliman and her hardworking crew the benefit of the doubt.
According to some of the homeless themselves who went on the outing, they received the invitation to take part only one or two days before the activity was scheduled to start. This detail adds to the growing perception that the outing was in fact a clearing operation.
Second, venue. While it is unreasonable to classify a resort or a hotel based on the price of its most expensive room (apparently, as much as P24,000 in the case of Chateau Royale), it is only logical to ask where the first two outings were conducted. Even if the government did not pay full price on the standard room rate of about P4,500, the DSWD must explain whether the rate it did pay was more or less the same as those it paid in the first two sessions. Participants have volunteered information that they ate as much as five times per day during their stay in the Nasugbu
resort. “They also fed us frequently. It sometimes felt a bit too much,” one of them told the Inquirer. Again, we must ask: Did the government pay more this time around?
Third, program. According to one participant, the government-paid vacation followed a regular schedule, including group exercises plus a talk per day. On the face of it, however, this seems like rather a loose schedule, not enough to meet the objective of the outing, if that objective were, as officials said, to “assess” the homeless’ suitability for the Modified Conditional Cash Transfer
Program. If the objective, however, were to remove those “vulnerable to the influx of people coming to witness the Pope” (Soliman’s words) out of harm’s way, then the program would have more than sufficed.
There are more questions needing to be asked. A congressional investigation is called for.