Alibi as apology

"I APOLOGIZE if we could not act even faster but given what we had, were not present when it hit your region. In anything else we are also students... and we want to do better next time, but again that shouldn't have been the case."

No, he did not say “I am sorry,” as his predecessor so ingloriously did in the wake of the Hello-Garci controversy.

Still, the response of President BS Aquino III to a Tacloban student during an open forum at the Hope Christian High School in Manila has been considered, even hailed, as an apology – the first time he made one since Supertyphoon Yolanda  struck the country four months ago.

It could have been the very first time in his entire gifted life, thus, a “rare apology,” chorused media. But is it really?

So BS Aquino III admitted that it shouldn't have taken the government days to respond but the extent of the Yolanda devastation was “unprecedented,” what with four million families and 44 out of 81 provinces affected.

Now, hear BS Aquino III’s soundbytes:

"[The] magnitude, I think, is unprecedented in our history and if I am not mistaken, this is the biggest storm to make landfall anywhere in the world…

"Everything was down... cellphones, etcetera.... Even the equipment whether it's heavy equipment, whether it's trucks, whether it was police vehicles, what have you, were also hit…

"Leyte is an island. We will have to either get to the sea ports or the airport and the airport is the fastest. The airport itself was heavily damaged. So you had to clear that before we could bring in the aircraft…

"We have to rely on the local government unit to provide the backbone. They will tell us who is in need, where, what is needed and 'di ba parang even just knowing who the people we will have to work with. [But] that was not existent Sunday, Saturday…

"Two hundred ninety policemen were supposed to be in Tacloban City alone. They actually had 20 on duty. Everybody else attended to something else. They are all being investigated. We [had] to bring in soldiers and policemen from other areas…”

Where’s the apology there?

It is a rambling (ir)rationalization of the Aquino administration’s inhered inanity, ineptitude, inaction in addressing any crisis, big and small, it faces. Outsourcing the blame instead to some poor hapless LGUs connected, by party or family, to presidential pet peeves.       

A sorry excuse for an apology, as the wife says. Least apology, mostly alibi there.

Rightfully and rightly, the Yolanda victims did not buy.

“President Aquino’s ‘apology’ seems to try to get away with his arrogant refusal to take responsibility for four months of hell for the Yolanda survivors.” So articulated Efleda Bautista, a typhoon survivor and convenor of the People Surge alliance, the victims collective rejection of BS Aquino III’s un-sorry.

“The ‘apology’ is not even directed to us, the survivors, who went to Malacanang in February and got snubbed by the President 100 days after Yolanda struck the region. Yolanda victims have been starving and dying as a result of this government’s ineptness and gross negligence and all he could say was ‘sorry’?” Bautista raged.

No, Madame, he did not even say “sorry.”

Much less extend comforting words any.

And bodies are still turning up in Leyte this late in the day.