Hiding poverty, more fun in the Philippines Written by Tribune Editorial Sunday, 25 January 2015 00:00 font size decrease font size increase font size Print Be the first to comment! Dinky Soliman and her Palace principals sure had a weird sense of fun in claiming that the street people of Manila were brought to Chateu Royale Resort in Batangas which Soliman indicated merely coincided with the papal visit last Jan. 15 to 19. The Palace excuse was that the homeless were regularly brought to beach resorts for evaluation as candidates for the government dole scheme called the conditional cash transfer (CCT). The alibi was triggered by the Daily Mail of the United Kingdom report that Manilas street children were rounded up and hidden from view particularly from the notice of Pope Francis. The Daily Mail story said the removal of the street people was made to spruce up Manila for the papal visit. While the claim of the report that the street children were caged was debatable, what was certain was that the growing community of street people in Manila mysteriously disappeared in the duration of the papal visit. It took a long while for the Palace and Soliman to come with the Batangas resort alibi since it was initially all denials about the removal of the street children and the incredible claim of Dinky that street children are regularly taken from the streets to be cared for when the streets prior and after the papal visit were crawling with street people. The half-wit alibis were futile since these were obviously lies as the street people who are in plain sight of everybody can always belie Dinky about her agencys caring for the poor. The CCT is now funded with P80 billion in the budget but its effects have not manifested in any way either in the poverty statistics or the daily realities through the sight of poverty, either in the streets or Filipinos going hungry and lifting food from trash. The two Filipino street children that moved Pope Francis to speak about empathizing with the poor in his visit to the University of Sto. Tomas gave testimonies on how the lives of many Filipino children are ravaged by poverty. It was good that the event did not include any Palace involvement because if so the two street children would have been definitely coached to praise Dinky and her CCT instead of pouring out their heart to the pontiff. Where in the world can one hear of the homeless being given dream beach vacations just to get them out of sight? Also, Dinky referred to 400 of the homeless being sent to Batangas during the papal visit which if true the question that remains is where the other street people vanished to since there were definitely not only 400 people living on the streets of Manila. The same vanishing trick on the street people would definitely be employed in November when heads of states visits Manila and other parts of the country for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit. The papal visit showed what Filipinos are capable of, not only in showing their faith to the Catholic religion but in the case of the Palace and Dinky, their resourcefulness in hiding the poverty situation in the country. The poverty level is about a third of the population which the Palace spin was reduced under the administration of Noynoy after the statistics office instituted changes in the formula in computing the poverty level that of course resulted in a more favorable data that Noynoy now often quotes when confronted with the issue of the widening gap between the rich and the poor under his term. The fudging of the data is not so different with sending the poor to a beach resort to keep them out sight during special state occasions. Published in Editorial
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 13:57:36 +0000
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