[] How local and national officials have performed in responding to the crisis.
[] Whom to blame and whether they’ll be punished: destroyers of nature, government regulators, local officials, and those involved in handling flood-control funds.
[] What else to do next: rehabilitation of flood victims and infrastructures and facilities; making the community safer against floods and other calamities -- and doing all that with less corruption by wasted or looted public funds.
They need to come out and account to their constituents. If they won’t, who’ll make them? Waiting for the next election is too long.
Those officials have the imperative duty to show to their constituents:
Their LGU didn’t receive any control fund or spend its own money for any flood control project.
If the LGU did, the mayor/governor or congressman/congresswoman did their job of overseeing the project as chief executives or as legislators who secured the funds for their district.
It’s a lame cop-out if the local official or national legislator would say he/she had nothing to do with the funds. It’s her duty to show that the LGU got or didn’t get the money’s worth, whatever the fund source.
Governors, mayors and congressmen or congresswomen whose tenure included flood control funds spent in their LGU or district.
Contractors who contracted the projects, shown or suspected to be substandard or ghost.
Private developers whose enterprises had no or inadequate flood control or caused or contributed to the deluge.
Those accused of or suspected of looting public funds have used “force majeure” as defense.
Under the law, no one is responsible for deaths and injuries from forces of nature. Lawyers call that “force majeure” or acts of God. Few would blame God publicly.
They wouldn’t and couldn’t jail God.
The flaw with that theory is that many good people are included in the punishment.
The new governor says she had barely warmed her seat and thus couldn’t be blamed for flood funds released across several years before her term.
So she spends much of her message to the public on blaming her predecessor.
The past governor says not a single peso passed her hand, since no money was downloaded to the Province and DPWH managed the projects. So her defense has been, “Not me, not my administration.”
All -- except one congressman who offered a cash reward for information about ghost or substandard projects -- have been awfully quiet.
Yet it is their bounden duty to account for projects in their respective districts, even if those projects were undertaken supposedly without their participation and spending was done by DPWH. What happened there? That is their responsibility to the district and its people.
A REAL PROBLEM. Cebuanos are known to be forgiving and forgetful. Like other Filipinos, they cannot be outraged long enough to see offenders punished and real reforms made. Uproar over the Priority Development Funds scandal of 2013 had clearly failed to curb the venal pork barrel looting, which instead became hugely monstrous under the current administration.