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Typhoon Haiyan



Tacloban mayor in power tussle with president following Haiyan disaster









Typhoon victims receive uneven aid as leaders attempt to assert control over Tacloban following long-standing rivalry














Alfred Romualdez’s uncle is considered to be the man who ordered the assassination of the current president’s father.
Photograph: Edgar Su/Reuters




Kate Hodal in Tacloban


Friday 22 November 2013 13.06 EST







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There is nothing at all about Alfred Romualdez's outward appearance to delineate him as a fighter. Strikingly tall and dressed in a red jersey top, blue tracksuit bottoms and tennis shoes, the 51-year-old Mayor of Tacloban – the city devastated by the super typhoon that ravaged the central Philippines two weeks ago – looks more like a father on his way to the gym than a politician caught up in a medieval web of bad blood.
But Romualdez has a very real battle on his hands, and it's with the Philippines president.
Their rivalry is Shakespearean in magnitude and nature. Both men come from long-ruling clans which, in the Philippines, means everything. Romualdez is the nephew of Imelda Marcos, the shoe-collecting wife of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and grew up in a town just south of Tacloban. He is also related to a slew of politicians in senate and congress – some of whom have sent out personal yachts and airplanes to deliver relief goods to desperate citizens.
President Benigno "Pnoy" Aquino III also comes from a long lineage of political rule, his father, Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino II, having been a bitter opponent of Marcos who was later assassinated. What adds a complicated and deadly twist is the fact that Romualdez's uncle Marcos is considered to be the man who ordered the assassination of the current president's father.
So it comes as no surprise that the two men should have bad blood between them. But the pawns in their game are the victims of the typhoon, who have suffered as the leaders attempt to assert control over their own patches, resulting in uneven aid distribution and massive miscommunication.
The national government, believing Romualdez to be incapacitated, has taken charge of almost everything, including the mayor's police force. Now Romualdez has wrested control of the one thing he thinks he can do well: local aid delivery.
"He's a Romualdez, and he's an Aquino," explains Aquino's spokesman Ricky Caradang impatiently. "The mayor traces his roots back to Mrs Marcos, whereas the president traces his roots back to Senator Aquino, which is like the whole political rivalry of the country.
"I wouldn't say they're friends and they're obviously not allies, but the relevant question is: Did those political differences make it difficult to do what had to be done here in Tacloban?"
Romualdez argues that they did, and claims the government is openly trying to unseat him.
"He really supports his party mates more than he supports the opposition, and that's clear," says Romualdez of Aquino. "I think everyone in the Philippines knows that.
"Unfortunately, everybody wants to be superman," he continues, choosing his words carefully. "So everyone wanted to take the helm and decide what is best for a situation like this, which is very dangerous. We have to leave that to professionals and not politicians. The little expertise I have, I've been mayor for seven, eight years, and I have witnessed so many different earthquakes, tsunami warnings, typhoons. And then you have somebody sitting there and deciding, who's never run a city, who's never really seen the actual damage or situation."
Their already terse relationship has been further hampered by the president's decision to investigate Romualdez for allegedly failing to adequately prepare his city ahead of the disaster, despite the fact that the mayor issued evacuation orders which he says were approved by the national government.
Romualdez shrugs off the threat.
"If you start the blame game and say, 'It's your fault, it's your fault,' that will also discourage other mayors in other areas from telling the truth … The national government did not respond immediately. They want to downplay the situation so there's not too many deaths. That's why his political allies, if you investigate in the other towns, they bury them [the dead] at random. They just bury them. Without body bags. They don't follow the codes which the International Red Cross imposes, so there's no closure. How will you know the statistics?"
He sighs, frustrated. "I don't want to get into issues of politics because it brings me away from my work. I just want to focus."
Mae Mayor, 35, a native Taclobanon who has voted for the mayor in all three elections, says rivalry between Aquino and Romualdez is the last thing anyone needs in the ravaged city.
"He has been doing a lot for the people of Tacloban [but] he too has been helpless and a victim," says the real-estate developer. "As much as he wanted to do everything in his power to help his fellow Taclobanon, people can't blame him [for] what nature brought us.
"I just hope that whatever happens to us won't be mixed with politics because we don't need it now. What Tacloban needs is help."
In the race to get his city back functioning, everything, it seems, is a fight. Romualdez must contend with the fact that around 90% of his city's infrastructure has been partially or entirely destroyed by the super storm. Some 25,000 residents – 10% of his constituents – have been displaced, and nearly 2,000 killed, with gruesome reminders of the tragedy becoming ever more apparent every day: this week a second mass burial site was dug to accommodate the growing number of corpses found washed ashore or from the mounds of debris that line the city's streets and canals.
City hall, on a hill overlooking the city, is a devastated but functioning headquarters packed full of relief goods, water-logged office files, broken glass partitions and fetid toilets where journalists, aid workers, civil servants and homeless locals meander the halls aimlessly. Romualdez's office, up a dirty staircase on the second floor, is bare but for a large desk and dirtied city flag.
Like the majority of his employees – most of whom have now begun trickling back to work –
Romualdez was almost washed away by the super storm and only survived by clutching onto roof rafters as the waters rose around him. In the fortnight since, he has eaten and slept little, and admits that in the quiet moments he has flashbacks of nearly losing his family to the storm surge that decimated his house and turned his city into a ruin.
"When something like this happens, all you do is give assurance to the people the storm is already over: 'You're now secured, we're here to help,'" Romualdez says as he drives a minivan through the rubble-filled streets on the way to visit a community. "The first thing you have to fix – you have to comfort the people and fix their mindset. It's [about] bringing their hopes back, allowing them to dream again."
Up to two weeks ago, Tacloban was a bustling commercial city and regional economic backbone, with Romualdez's government winning awards for transparency and good governance. It is perhaps due to that former buzz that the city is now quickly picking up pace. Residents are busy rebuilding their homes; banks have temporarily reopened in the kitchens of fast-food restaurants; the city market now sells bread, milk and apples (and sometimes pork adobo); and shopkeepers have begun drying out their stock from once-flooded shelves, meticulously laying out their goods on city centre pavements.
Romualdez's wife Christina, a petite ex-B-film star with bleached hair who owns the downtown beauty salon where the family is now sleeping, describes a man wholly dedicated to his job.
"At first he wasn't even eating – he'd work all day and night without eating a single meal," she says in between distributing relief goods. "I have to force him to eat. He'll sleep at 12am or 1am, and wake up at 4am or 5am, and go the whole day without eating unless I force him to take a break. I have to say to him, OK, you're home now. Relax for a little bit. You need it."
Romualdez describes being mayor as "watching 20 channels at the same time". And while he says he would "never consider" running for president, he may instead be grooming his only son Raymond, 25, to take on the same mayoral post that both he and his father Daniel have held in Tacloban.
Raymond, who now runs the family shipping company, says it's a job everyone, including Taclobanons, expects him to do, then adds with a shrug: "I don't know. I just do whatever my dad tells me to do."
Romualdez believes it will take a year for the city to fully bounce back and believes that little things – such as a free cable showing of Manny Pacquiao's boxing match on Sunday, which he has dedicated to the victims of Haiyan – will help boost morale.
"It's sad," he says. "I almost died. My family almost died. My city is in ruins.
"This is my last term," he continues. "I don't want to leave my city like this. I want to bring it back to the way it was, and even better."



Topics



Typhoon Haiyan




Philippines




Natural disasters and extreme weather








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