YESTERDAY Panay News reported that Iloilo City’s Mayor Jerry Treñas was livid with anger over the chaos that ensued at the Iloilo Sports Complex when the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) regional office was distributing financial aid for students over the weekend.
The overcrowding and slow service was recipe for disaster and could possibly be another COVID super-spreader event. Treñas was compelled to condemn DSWD’s “stupid planning.”
The Mayor threatened to declare its regional director persona non grata in Iloilo for failing to coordinate with the city government on how best to distribute the funds without the suffering and real threats of bodily injury that attended the “terribly planned” event.
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Parents and their children trooped from all over Iloilo province to avail themselves of what we may call a mere pittance of a thousand to four thousand pesos ($20 to $40) in financial aid that DSWD wanted to release in a resounding blast.
Money confetti from a helicopter would have been a more tolerable insult.
The people sacrificed a full night’s rest and practically made a vigil over what most of them would not be able to get in the end.
“Gutom gid kag kapoy,” was how one mother from Zarraga described her ordeal. She was at the venue as early as 3 a.m., but that extraordinary punctuality was not rewarded with the assistance that she prayed for.
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The Iloilo situation mirrored the rest of the country. All hell broke loose at the DSWD central office where Secretary Erwin Tulfo was compelled to apologize at the end of the day. The limited number of staff was no match to the thousands upon thousands of would-be beneficiaries from all corners of the Philippines.
Many were injured in the melee that transpired in Zamboanga.
A social worker in Cagayan de Oro admitted they had less than one week to prepare since Secretary Tulfo announced the weekend releases. The short notice was the proximate cause of this massive blunder.
The staff were made to bear the brunt of the humanly impossible.
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There is at least one Tulfo in the Cabinet in the successive Duterte and Marcos administrations. Wanda Tulfo-Teo headed the Department of Tourism until a controversial contract with government television station PTV4 was laid bare.
Is there a concentration of leadership genes in one family?
It appears to be so, given that the Teo controversy seems to be all but forgotten, there is another Tulfo in the Senate, Senator Raffy’s wife Jocelyn is a member of the House of Representatives, and their son Ralph is another congressman representing Quezon City.
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There lies the rub. It is the little people who suffer if the motivation for action is anchored on political considerations.
The code of conduct for public officers and employees has already established standards for official action.
Members of the cabinet, no matter how extolled their position is, do not enjoy absolute freedom and discretion in performing their functions. They are subject to the parameters set by the people, speaking through Congress, and even by their predecessors and support staff who have been taught by training and experience.
The intent may have been laudable – to please everyone. But the DSWD ended up annoying the underprivileged, the very constituency it is supposed to serve./PN
