Empathy

A couple of days after calamity struck, he was adjudged to have “failed to show leadership in the crisis, and was too slow in acknowledging the severity of the disaster.”

Five days after that big tsunami struck Japan in 2011, Prime Minister Naoto Kan resigned his post. That was the honorable thing to do.

He did not hew and haw about the unexpected scale of the calamity produced by an unpredicted quake. He did not try to pass the blame to the local officials of the hapless communities wiped out by the wave. He did not make a show of passing water bottles to the dazed victims. He did not philosophize about the untamable forces of nature.

He was prime minister, not rescue worker — although he did not offer that excuse. His nation was in shock. There was chaos where the tsunami struck. The best he could do to help assuage his country was to bow his head low and leave his post.

No one will remember Naoto Kan a few short years from now. That is probably the better outcome than being reviled for generations as the leader who failed to contain the calamity.

It might seem unjust that the verdict of history is shaped by calamities beyond anyone’s control. Nevertheless, calamities confront political leaders with excruciating trials by ordeal that make them or break them. If they manage to lead their people through, they are hailed as heroes. If they fail, they are adjudged heels.

Christiane Amanpour was brilliant when she posed President Aquino this question: Will this calamity be your presidency’s legacy?

Before she threw that question, Aquino seemed to be completely evasive, as if reciting stuff from notecards fed him before the interview. Aquino appeared taken aback by that question. He had not thought about it. Like the other questions in that globally televised interview, he evaded this one too.

This short interview between a powerful television journalist and a weak president might not define the course of history. It will definitely define, however, the way the world sees our leader: one who hews and haws, hides behind bureaucratese, one who tries vainly to assign blame in the midst of crisis and obscure the parameters of his own responsibility.

The world’s judgment was formed ahead of that interview, after journalists from the world’s most respected news sources flew almost literally into the eye of the storm to document its unhappy aftermath. A CNN reporter, observing Tacloban in chaos, put it pointedly: there is no leader, no government and no civil defense.

In the first few days after the typhoon, the nation and the world concluded we had a weak and petty leader who offered excuses instead of solutions, who could not rise above partisanship to rally his people, and who could not speak directly to the victims with enough genuine empathy to console them.

When he first visited Tacloban two days after the storm, he did not venture much outside the airport and then pronounced things to be under control. He berated an underling who reported the city 90% devastated. He suggested the local officials were at fault for calamity that visited the city.

Soon after, he became obsessed with the body count, firing the police official who, while the storm was still raging, roughly estimated the casualty count could run to as high as 10,000. Our disaster officials, as if on cue, seemed to be understating the body count for a few days.

When he returned to the devastated area last Sunday, he was still reciting that mantra about local governments having first responsibility for dealing with a calamity. He blamed the delay of relief flow on local officials, saying they did not provide information about what was needed.

When a ship sinks, rescuers do not look for the captain first to interview him. Rescuers ought to act quickly to save lives.

Knowing the dimensions of Typhoon Yolanda before it actually hit, government should have fully mobilized the army and called up reserves. Relief goods should have been pre-loaded on Navy and Coast Guards ships, ready to go. Trucks and heavy equipment should have been commandeered to immediately clear paths for rescue teams. None of these are things local governments can do by themselves.

The fact is we were completely unprepared to deal with the aftermath of a super typhoon. Unlike the tsunami that hit Japan after a strong underwater quake, we knew about the typhoon for days but did very little.

Just two weeks before the typhoon and just after a quake rocked Bohol, we threw in P18 billion to buy a squadron of fighter jets from South Korea. In the aftermath of Yolanda, we were borrowing transport planes from all our neighbors. That is shameful. It is as if we splurged on a Porsche when what we really needed was a pick-up.

This administration’s behavior after the storm has been odd. A police general was sacked for making a large estimate of the possible casualty toll while the storm was still raging. The mayor of Tacloban was pressured, while corpses lined his streets and the situation was desperate, to yield his post to Mar Roxas. The last CNN report contrasted the Interior Secretary’s insistence aid was being delivered everywhere with the voices of starving victims who have not seen relief for a week.

This government must try and separate the tasks of managing a crisis with that of managing their political image. The latter is already ruined.