HOW stupid does President Benigno Aquino III think Filipinos are?
Very stupid, if we go by the words of his Cabinet members and official spokespersons.
Last week, deputy spokesperson Abigail Valte concocted a fiction that she peddled with a straight face.
When a Catholic bishop called them out on a plan by the Department of Social Welfare and Development to hide the homeless during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Valte insisted that the homeless would not be hidden from the Apec delegates and that the cash given to each of them was part of the government’s modified conditional cash transfer program.
She said it was merely a fluke that the “activity” coincided with the Apec summit and added cryptically: “[W]e have seen this opportunity to start helping them so they could have a transition from the streets into dignified living quarters.”
Could those “dignified living quarters” include transitioning the street children to a resort outside the city where the homeless could conveniently be attending a “workshop” away from view of Apec leaders and delegates for the duration of their visit?
This was the same load of cow manure the Palace shoveled onto the public plate when Social Welfare Secretary Corazon Soliman admitted to Time Magazine that homeless families along Roxas Boulevard were sent away during the papal visit in January so they would “not be vulnerable to the influx of people coming to witness the pope.”
On Jan. 14, one day before the pope arrived, 10 bus loads of street dwellers arrived at the Chateau Royale Resort in Nasugbu, Batangas, a posh retreat that normally charges P6,300 a night. There, the DSWD booked 70 rooms for the 500 street children and their families for a “family camp” that the government said was part of the CCT program.
Coincidentally, the families checked out of the resort on Jan. 19, the last day of the pope’s visit.
Last month, Soliman also lied to the public when she said there would no longer be any bunkhouses left in Tacloban City and that all survivors of Super Typhoon “Yolanda” would have been moved to permanent housing by the end of October.
The bunkhouses remain, a testament to this government’s incompetence and Secretary Soliman’s great capacity for lying. The truth of the matter is that in the two years since the killer typhoon struck and despite the massive amounts of aid poured into rehabilitation efforts, the government has completed only 17,641 housing units, less than one-fifth of its target of 92,554 units.
With more than one million people homeless as a result of the storm, Economic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan had the gall to boast last week that the government is about halfway done with its rehabilitation work.
In a sharp counterpoint to Secretary Balisacan’s optimistic claim, the Commission on Audit has discovered that at least P382 million in local and foreign cash donations for the typhoon victims were kept idle in the DSWD’s bank accounts, while P923 million were kept idle in the bank accounts of the Office of the Civil Defense.
Contrary to his claims of following the straight path, President Aquino has been a party to all these and many more untruths, revealing his contempt for a public that he considers too gullible for independent thought. In so doing, he has given us a twisted version of the words of his martyred father, who declared that the Filipino is worth dying for—gleefully exchanging the “d” with an “l.”
