“People are outraged by the unconscionable corruption that attended thousands of flood control projects, but they should likewise blame incompetence and negligence which are just as criminal”
TYPHOON Tino’s death toll would likely reach 300 by the time this article sees print, with more than 100 yet missing a week after its onslaught.
Pangasinan’s representative, Mark Cojuangco posits: “Bakit kasi sa flood plain gumawa ng tirahan?”
That remark caused an uproar, with many finding it insensitive to victims who had just lost loved ones and livelihood.
Maybe Cojuangco was just being frank, but is he blaming the residents and not the agencies that allowed such?
To begin with, and this writer has been consistently railing against it — we are an over-populated nation, with close to 120 million living, and many in sub-human existence, in a mere 300,000 hectares dispersed through 7,641 islands (that used to be 7,107 islands, but government now counts all those islets that bob in and out of water, as if the number of islands are an advantage rather than an adversity.
Our ASEAN neighbors, bigger in contiguous land masses, have less people crowding their urban centers, but that’s something we have been writing about as well.
We cannot cull our people the way we cull poultry when an epidemic strikes.
Tokhang erased 6,000 or more drug pushers and addicts from the country’s population, yet see how the whole “civilized” world reacted, countries which have through generations promoted birth control and population management while we grew more and more babies without providing for their proper sustenance.
If a sane government starts pro-actively managing population growth come 2028, it would take a generation to see palpable results.
In 1978, Thailand and the Philippines had 43 to 44 million people each. There are now 70 million Thais, while we have almost 120 million. We have 300,000 square kilometers of land, they have 513,120. See what I mean?
But part of population management is not just about total numbers. It is also about density which can be managed by strictly enforced regulations, and location, which can be classified and habitat-prohibited.
Cojuangco is correct, but why in the first place did government allow people to inhabit flood plains and river banks?
Why, pray tell, can Iloilo City through Mayor Jerry Trenas work tirelessly through years to construct a scientifically planned and properly constructed flood spillway, sans concrete walls and instead lied with vegetation, while more prosperous Cebu cannot?
Why have our legislators (oh, them again?) not passed a National Land Use Act, which has been introduced in every Congress since Cory’s time but never passed?
Why, even our laid-back president who says he is “very, very sorry” (shades of GMA’s “I am sorry” 20 years ago) enumerated that priority legislation in his first SONA, but has given up three SONAs after.
Remember how on Dec. 4, 2012, thousands living in the Cagayan de Oro river banks perished as a super typhoon brought waters cascading down Bukidnon’s slopes?
Even media seems to have forgotten that tragedy in Northern Mindanao as we mourn those who perished in Liloan and Talisay and metro Cebu.
And yet the similarities are there.
We never learn. It is the negligence, incompetence and corruption of government officials, national or local, which kill and destroy.
Not informal settlers who have no recourse but to exist wherever they can. Not middle class residents who are fooled by developers into buying property with hard-earned savings cum loans on what should be terra prohibita.
DENR vows to investigate the Monterrazas in the Guadalupe slopes upon Cebu City. But did they not grant an ECC before building even started?
Did not the city government grant a building permit? Where in hell’s name was government then, yet now, in heaven’s fury, vows to investigate? Hello?
Footages of the provinces devastated by Typhoon Uwan show how perilously close to shores human habitats have been allowed by government.
Good that images of Tino’s wrath may have forced residents in such places to be evacuated to safer ground, but what if the waves and winds were of Yolanda strength?
Our president drops in on Liloan and Talisay for a few minutes, and likely will visit some other places Uwan devastated, giving promises of consuelo de bobo, and then hies off to a “command performance,” a concert at the Goldenberg mansion near the palace, perhaps to forget the cold, even hostile response most Cebuanos gave him.
People are outraged by the unconscionable corruption that attended thousands of flood control projects, but they should likewise blame incompetence and negligence which are just as criminal.
Demonstrate that outrage that cries to the heavens for retribution come Nov. 16 to 18 and then again come Nov. 30.
