After ‘Yolanda,’ doing media interviews instead of helping its survivors

President Aquino’s reaction to the “word war” between Tacloban City Mayor Alfred Romualdez and Interior Secretary Mar Roxas over the poor and terrible government response to the worst devastation by a typhoon ever recorded was, “My conscience is clear.” Mr. Aquino went to say: “And, unfortunately, and I think all of you are witnesses, what has transpired is a media war. He [Romualdez] has spent time—a lot of interviews—from Day One, as opposed to doing what he is supposed to do.”

With the world noting the government’s “inefficient,” “disorganized” relief operations following Supertyphoon “Yolanda,” which only showed Mr. Aquino’s poor leadership, these statements truly show a lot about the President’s character. And then Mr. Aquino blames Romualdez, the head of one of the local government units hit hardest by the typhoon.

I can’t make sense of  Mr. Aquino’s words and actions but one thing is very clear: The President doesn’t have a heart for the poorest survivors of this catastrophe. Maybe he needs to be reminded as well that he is the President of the Philippines and after Yolanda slammed into the country, he spent most of his time giving interviews to international media—even giving an apparently widely off-the-mark estimate of the typhoon’s death toll—when he should have been helping ease the plight of the survivors.

—CHELSEA ALONZO,

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