Editorial: The new Marawi, one year in

IF there’s anything the plan to rebuild Marawi City lacks, it’s not ambition.

According to guidelines set by the National Housing Authority (NHA), the contractor that will rebuild the city’s most affected area must, among many others, build concrete roads with bike lanes; place all utilities underground; erect 22 two-storey school buildings with at least 20 classrooms each; set up a lakefront convention hall that can seat 5,000; and develop a two-hectare memorial site in honor of the soldiers and civilians who died in the siege of the city, which began exactly a year ago.

But ambition is one thing and execution, another.

In a comprehensive report, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) pointed out that Task Force Bangon Marawi has yet to produce the final version of the master plan for the new Marawi City. The group pre-selected to pursue the project, Bagong Marawi Consortium, “consists of companies with little to no experience in public contracting in the Philippines, and a lead Chinese entity with a checkered history of being blacklisted, investigated, and sued for collusive bidding, fraud, bad projects, tax evasion, and political lobbying in the country and overseas,” wrote PCIJ’s Malou Mangahas and Karol Ilagan, as well as Carolyn Arguillas of MindaNews.

The projected cost of this phase of rehabilitation work, which will cover about one-fourth of Marawi’s 96 barangays, is P17.2 billion. How the contractor plans to recover its costs is not yet known, the PCIJ report added.

We can all agree that efforts to rebuild and rehabilitate Marawi are urgent. Can we also agree that transparency in such efforts is crucial and mustn’t be sacrificed in the name of speed? Postwar reconstruction creates windfalls. Who gets these windfalls in Marawi’s case is a necessary question.

Look up Lebanon’s experience in building Beirut’s central district after 15 years of war. Writing for The Washington Post, Julia Tierney observed that the development of Solidere turned Beirut into “a city of exclusion” and illustrated “the extent to which reconstruction has blurred the boundaries between public interest and private profit.”

At the signing last week of a grant agreement with Japan, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez said that some 900 projects for Marawi City and its surrounding areas will probably cost P55 billion total. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs quoted him as saying that Government would consider calling for a pledging session to raise more funds to rebuild the city. A year after Marawi’s ordeal started, let us all wish the city’s inhabitants well. That’s not inconsistent with watching closely as its ambitious rehabilitation program proceeds.