Into whose hands should their blood drip?
A motorcycle taxi rider, and others before him, died, collapsing in the dust after hours under the punishing sun, waiting in one of the government’s endless ayuda queues for a few thousand pesos.
The deaths must not remain mere statistics. The anonymous gig worker was a father, a breadwinner, a man who spent his days dodging traffic to feed his family.
He died because the line was too long, the relief too slow, and the policy too cruel.
The response was predictable, thanks to the farcical assistance that politicians have learned to perfect.
The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) promised to assist the family with the funeral expenses and other aid, while Quezon City officials ordered a review of the distribution system.
The DSWD then announced a shift in future cash distributions to e-wallet transfers, which only infuriated the public since this should have been done from the start, rather than making the beneficiaries suffer.
The responsibility should fall on Executive Secretary Ralph Recto and the clique of economic managers who have stubbornly, arrogantly and criminally blocked the suspension of fuel taxes.
They did it even though an Executive Order (EO) explicitly gives President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. the emergency power to reduce or scrap those taxes outright.
The EO should have been used to alleviate the suffering of millions, but Recto and his band of technocrats said no.
Instead, they pushed the farce of “targeted subsidies” and “ayuda distribution.”
A simple price reduction was transformed into a bureaucratic gauntlet of registration, verification, queuing and rationing, the very machinery that killed that rider.
They chose the most inefficient, most humiliating, most deadly option available, then congratulated themselves for their “fiscal responsibility.”
Suspending the fuel taxes would have lowered pump prices for every Filipino — without the lines and paperwork — instantly. No dead rider.
Every tricycle, jeepney and delivery rider, every struggling household would have felt immediate relief. That is what emergency powers are for.
Recto and the economic managers would not allow it as they lectured the public about revenue loss.
They preferred to spend billions on cumbersome, leak-prone subsidies that require punishing queues, rather than let the President exercise the power they themselves helped draft.
Their stubborn position was a display of their contempt for the poor.
How many more must die in the ayuda lines before Malacañang admits the subsidy program is not relief but a display of desperate government action amid the crisis?
The motorcycle rider did not die because of high global oil prices but because Recto and his economic cabal denied the single policy that would have worked immediately and cleanly.
President Marcos must stop hiding behind his advisers. The EO and the power attached to it are his. This death is his responsibility unless he acts.
The rider who collapsed in the ayuda line was another name on the indictment that history is already writing, with the names of Ralph Recto and his economic managers in bold.
Give the blockers the boot and suspend the taxes to end the deadly charade.