EDITORIAL - A little magic

The Department of Social Welfare and Development has reportedly admitted that it has been repacking relief goods donated by a number of countries intended for victims of supertyphoon Yolanda which ravaged the entire Visayas, but more particularly the provinces of Leyte and Samar.

The DSWD explained that it resorted to repacking the foreign donated relief goods to make it easier to make an accounting of the items afterward. That seems to be a very lame and limp excuse. If that was truly the intention, why did it have to wait until the matter got exposed on Facebook?

If it had been the intention of DSWD to make it easier to account for all the donated goods, it should have made the announcement beforehand. The media is just a text or a call away. It could have either called for a press conference or issue a press release to the effect.

But the agency said nothing about what it was doing until some volunteers who did the repacking refused to take part in what seemed to them an anomalous activity. It did not take long for some of these volunteers to bring the matter up on social media, prompting the DSWD to come up with its explanation.

According to the volunteers who complained, the foreign-donated goods were already packed and ready for distribution. All that was needed was for them to be brought to their intended destinations and be distributed. Had that been done, relief would have been far quicker and more efficient.

But that is not what happened. What happened was, the already packed and ready to be distributed goods had to be repacked in containers of the DSWD. The agency explained that it had no intention of misrepresenting the donations as its own.

Granting the DSWD had no such intention of misrepresenting the donations as its own, still it does not follow that repacking the goods in DSWD containers will make accounting for their distribution later far easier and more credible.

Besides, it is not fair to the donor countries, many of which responded far quicker than our very own government, that their donated relief goods bearing the names of their origin be hidden and obscured by the name and logo of the DSWD. The victims deserve to know from whom and from where the relief came from.