Corazon “Dinky” Soliman, whose department gets regularly raked over the coals when it attempts to perform its job of giving relief to victims of calamities or hiding the poor when foreign dignitaries come a-visiting, has done it again. Soliman didn’t even mess up her multi-colored hair when she told a television interviewer that she cannot hide the homeless, especially those who refuse to leave the streets because that is their chosen “lifestyle.”
Soliman explained that her Department of Social Welfare and Development has been working to take the homeless off the streets because most of them don’t actually want to be without homes. The others who remain do so because it is “a lifestyle that they already have.”
And DSWD has been conducting seminars and reorientation programs for these people, coinciding strangely with the arrival of foreign heads of state, since 2013 as a sort of social engineering experiment. “The social preparation for behavior change is [the] more challenging [part of our job],” she said.
Officials have reported that DSWD and other government authorities have already taken some 20,000 homeless people away from the streets to save them from the dangers of being exposed. Given enough visiting heads of state, I have no doubt that Soliman will be able to remove every homeless person from Metro Manila, to “reorient” them like she did those who were living in the streets during the Pope’s visit at a provincial resort.
What Soliman never did sufficiently explain was why the regular roundup of homeless people always coincides with the arrival of big-time visitors. And why, if they’ve already been reoriented, they return to the streets that they have come to call their home when those visitors leave.
The simple answer, if you ignore Soliman’s social reengineering blather, is that not enough has been done for the poor, which is why they “choose” to live on the street. This is upheld by survey after survey which has found that more than half of Filipinos consider themselves impoverished, even under a government that declared that it would eliminate both poverty and corruption under its term.
And Soliman, unless all that hair dye on her head has already leaked into her brain, should never say that there are just some people who choose to be homeless. Some people just don’t have any place else to live—except when some big kahuna arrives, and Dinky and her minions take them away for temporary “reorientation” sessions somewhere far, far away.
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If all goes well during the hosting of the Apec summit next week, it will most likely be because of the efforts of a man whom President Noynoy Aquino can’t even stand to be in the same room with. And Ambassador Mariano “Jun” Paynor, who holds the post of director general of the national organizing council for Apec 2015, probably won’t mind not being in the spotlight after the event is successfully held—unlike all other government officials from Aquino on down.
It’s true that Paynor, a former military officer and a career diplomat who was once our ambassador to Israel, is someone who is not in the good graces of the current occupant of Malacañang Palace, for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with his experience and competence. But because Paynor was also the show-runner of Apec 1996 in Subic (the only other time the Philippines hosted the summit) and the main organizer of the visit of Pope Francis to Manila last January, there was really no one else that the government could trust to do the work of acting as the main man of next week’s meeting of 21 world leaders.
Because Paynor is also very much identified with both the Ramos and the Arroyo administrations, Aquino is not really comfortable with the head Apec organizer. So instead of dealing directly with Paynor, as previous Presidents have, Aquino has chosen to put another layer between him and the former ambassador, in the person of Secretary to the Cabinet Rene Almendras—the President’s former Ateneo classmate and one of his closest friends.
Paynor, a member of the high-profile Class of 1971 of the Philippine Military Academy (to which both Senator Gregorio Honasan and former Senator Panfilo Lacson also belong), doesn’t really mind. His job, as he sees it, is to make sure that no hitches happen during the hosting of the summit despite the challenges that holding it in chaotic, traffic-clogged Metro Manila entails.
But ever since Aquino signed the order three years ago formalizing the Philippines’ hosting duties, there was really no other choice for the person to run the Apec show but Paynor. And the low-key Paynor, who was also given job of overall coordinator of the Pope’s visit as a sort of dry run for next week’s summit, knew that he still had to prove himself to his skeptical President.
But everyone involved in the preparations for the Apec summit already knows that Paynor was going to land the job. And in spite of the challenges posed by a Manila hosting, the arriving foreign delegations who knew him from 1996 have been reassured, as well.
But before the credit-grabbing for a successful hosting job starts in earnest by the end of next week, here’s what you should know: Jun Paynor is the real show-runner, even if he will be the last to take credit for a job well done.