Incapacitated

The number of dead and missing in the Pantukan, Compostela landslide continues to climb. Rescuers are digging in the mud to recover the remains of other possible victims. It is dangerous work, as the rains continue to pour.

Now we know that geohazard maps show the entire area to be vulnerable. The local authorities are, presumably, aware of the perils for human settlements. Last year, 10 people died in a similar landslide.

The people in the affected community were also aware of the perils. They chose to settle in the area against authoritative advice to literally scratch a living from the highly mineralized earth, engaging in small-scale mining and marginal agriculture. They do so with a staunchly fatalistic attitude towards the hazards: the uncertainties of the terrain eminently outweighed by the certainty of income.

In the face of yet another calamity, one linked to the aftereffects of Sendong, the President issued what has now become the standard response: he ordered a probe into the incident. He has issued so many such orders we now need a full audit team to inventory the findings, if any, of all such probes.

I am sure there is some culpability to be found at the local government level. When settlements are tolerated in vulnerable areas eventually hit by calamity, local executives must have reneged on the responsibility of maintaining the highest standards of public safety. The same may be said of urban executives who tolerate the growth of large slum areas that are prone to deadly fires that consume shanties by the score, as we saw a few days ago in Quezon City.

But what about the negligence of national government in ensuring sufficient capacity among the local units to preempt calamities?

Since he is so enamored with ordering probes, the President might want to order a sincere evaluation of policy failings by his administration that led to failure to contain the destructiveness of the calamities that visited us recently.

Batangas Representative Hermilando Mandanas once chaired the powerful House Ways and Means Committee until, it is said, he was stripped of his post because he refused to sign that slapstick impeachment complaint against the Chief Justice. He subsequently resigned from the Liberal Party as well.

Mandanas now threatens to file a case before the Supreme Court to compel national government to release the full share of the internal revenue allotment (IRA) due them. The reduction in the IRA is now a provocative issue pitting the local governments against the administration. The congressman from Batangas has been a staunch advocate of fully empowering local governments  which could be the “policy difference” averred to by Palace loyalists trying to blunt the perception that Mandanas was removed from his post for refusing to sign the impeachment complaint.

Recall that President Aquino last year vetoed budget items relating to disaster preparedness. In addition, the relief funds of the DSWD was reduced as an effect of the general reduction in that agency’s funds and the allocation of money to support the conditional cash transfer program. When calamities struck, the President ordered funding for disaster-response activities  activities that might not have been necessary if we adequately prepared for disaster in the first place.

Cagayan de Oro, the scene of the most Sendong-related deaths, is a case in point. The city had not received its IRA when disaster-struck it  even as that allocation was reduced by 4.8 percent. The local government was not only prepared to deal with the calamity’s effects, it was not equipped to avert it in the first place.

The cuts incapacitate local governments. There is only so much local governments can do if the funding they are entitled to by law is withheld almost at whim by the national government.

Yet local governments are expected to be at the forefront of disaster-preparedness and rescue efforts. If they are unable to meet desperate expectations during emergencies, they take the blame. If national government causes them to be incapacitated by withholding funds and then helps in assigning blame to the local governments, bitterness at the grassroots will be bred.

Local executives I have talked to tend to pin the blame on two administration officials: Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima and Budget Secretary Florencio Abad. They hold the duo responsible for egging the President to strip away the funds for disaster-preparedness programs and for reducing the IRA (in some cases, delaying the actual release as is the case for Cagayan de Oro).

Local executives feel this is being done to window-dress our fiscal picture in order to win an improvement in our credit ratings. They see little sense in winning a ratings upgrade if this means absorbing so much loss of life and damage to property directly attributable to the diminished capacity of local governments.

From where they stand, the local government executives are beginning to think they are being sacrificed for the sake of improving the image of national government. They take the death toll and then the blame while national government crows about its credit upgrade “achievements.”

Given recent experience, there are now more voices demanding an increase in the IRA from the current 40% to 60%. Doing so will make fiscal management all the more precarious for the national government. But more and more local executives now feel increasing the IRA will be a much lesser evil than leaving their fates to a national government whose priorities do not include ensuring the safety of citizens, especially the rural poor.

Having antagonized the churches, the military, large sections of the civil service and, lately, the judiciary, the administration now finds itself at odds with the local governments.