The inauspicious start of this year’s Southeast Asian (SEA) Games is quickly becoming a lesson for Filipino officials.
Two things need to be done. First, competent and efficient leadership must be quickly asserted to ensure that our visitors—athletes and officials from our Southeast Asian neighbors—are accorded the treatment they deserve. Second, all parties concerned must stop finger pointing and work together to avert further international embarrassment. There will be time enough to ascribe blame—after the Games are over.
By now, we are all familiar with the stories that marred the run-up to the Games’ opening on Nov. 30. One visiting football team waited for hours at the airport before their transportation took them to their hotel, which had no provisions for their early check-in. At least one team was taken to the wrong hotel, and athletes from Muslim countries were offered no halal food and given Chinese sausages made of minced pork. Foreign and local press alike struggled with an accreditation process that kept some of them waiting days for their IDs—some of which went out with the wrong photos. A “media center” turned out to be a room with unfinished hollow-block walls, a whiteboard of some description and plastic chairs—worth perhaps of some backwater sporting event, but hardly acceptable for an international tournament of this scale.
Clearly, all this suggests a failure of leadership and planning.
With enough foresight, these problems could have easily been averted—had the organizers been doing their jobs. We learn, for instance, that the National Commission on Muslim Filipinos (NCMF) had reached out to the organizers about providing halal food to athletes from Muslim countries. Inexplicably, these offers were ignored.
As one problem piled on top of another, the finger pointing began. Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano, who heads the Philippine Southeast Asian Games Organizing Committee, blamed opposition Senator Franklin Drilon for cutting and delaying the budget for the Games.
But as Senate President Vicente Sotto III points out, the House could have objected to the budget cuts in the bicameral conference committee. They did not do so.
Logic also suggests that the problems that have surfaced so far have less to do with the lack of funding and more to do with the failure to plan and execute the necessary tasks. Keeping track of arriving teams and ensuring they have timely transportation—that doesn’t take a lot of money. Nor does making sure that all athletes are adequately fed.
President Rodrigo Duterte is said to be displeased with the inconveniences suffered by the country’s guests and wants an investigation of the problems hounding the Philippines’ hosting of the Games.
His spokesman, who had initially sought to play down the complaints as “not that serious,” now says those responsible would be held accountable, and that the organizers should learn from mistakes.
He also now admits that what the organizers have done “is not a good example of how a country should host” an international event.
This is all well and good, but clearly somebody must now take charge to ensure that these mistakes are not committed again to the embarrassment of the entire nation.
