Mariano Roque, Administrator of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA), stirred a hornet's nest when he refused to provide assistance to repatriate the remains of a murdered caregiver, Jocelyn Dulnuan, in Canada last October 2007. The reason he gave was that Dulnuan was not a "member" of OWWA at the time of her death because she did not pay her US$25 membership fee. That was brutally cold and insensitive.
OWWA records showed that Dulnuan's membership was processed in July 2005 when she left for Hong Kong to work as a domestic worker. She moved to Canada in November 2006 with legitimate working papers. However, she failed to register her new employment with OWWA when she moved to Canada.
Rashid Fabricante, Action Officer of the Volunteers in Service to Filipinos in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in an email to me said, "the legal assistance and repatriation fund as provided for by our Magna Carta should have covered Jocelyn's repatriation but I wonder what OWWA in Ontario have done with her case." He added that "OWWA should come into the picture to take care of our welfare to include repatriation procedures and/or hospitalization bills."
A more stinging rebuke was expressed by Flora Belinan, the Chairperson of Migrante-Metro Baguio. She was quoted by the Northern Philippine Times as saying: "The problem is the OWWA omnibus policies and not whether or not Jocelyn paid the membership fees. The OWWA, as the main agency for the supposed provision of services to OFWs in distress should provide this assistance to all OFWs. The membership fee should be charged to the employers and not the OFWs."
The OWWA controversy on Dulnuan's case has once again brought to the front burner issues that have been flickering in the back burner for the past several years: Is OWWA serving the best interests of the OFWs? And of equal -- if not more -- importance, how is the OWWA trust fund managed?
In a news release by the Migrante International (MI) on March 6, 2004, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was accused of "robbing OFW funds for her election campaign." It said that "P520 million from the OWWA Medicare was transferred to PhilHealth while P100 million was diverted into Malacanang's National Livelihood Support Fund." MI Secretary General Maita Santiago said: "As part of the Macapagal-Arroyo administration's effort to channel more funds into President Gloria's campaign, they implemented the recent OWWA Omnibus Policies and blatantly transferred millions of pesos to Malacanang." Senator Aquilino Pimentel, Jr., the Senate minority leader at that time said that the transfer was illegal because the OWWA fund was a trust fund for the exclusive use for the needs and welfare of the OFWs.
The controversial OWWA Omnibus Policies deny services to OFWs without current "employment contracts." For example: if an OFW's contract expired or terminated, he or she ceases to qualify for OWWA benefits. In addition, the medical reimbursement program and repatriation for distressed OFWs were scrapped. In other words, OFWs were left to fend for themselves.
There was the case of the "phantom" evacuation operations in the Middle East. In April 2003, US$293,500 was released to Ambassador Roy Cimatu to be used in evacuating OFWs during the US-Iraq war. But when MI Chairperson Connie Bragas-Regalado asked former OWWA Administrator Virgilio Angelo to confirm the evacuation operations, the latter said that no evacuation took place. The question is: what happened to the US$293,500 (15 million pesos) released to Cimatu? Your guess is as good as mine.
But it was a different situation in July 2006 when 34,000 OFWs were caught in the crossfire when Israel forces struck Hezbollah camps inside Lebanon. When Ambassador to Lebanon Al Francis Bichara asked the Philippine government to send funds for the immediate evacuation of the stranded OFWs, his request fell on deaf ears. When Senator Pimentel inquired about the OWWA funds, he couldn't get a straight answer. He asked the Senate -- which was controlled by Arroyo's party at that time -- to investigate the disbursement of the OWWA fund. However, certain people tried to dissuade him from proceeding with investigation saying that "the probe will not in anyway hamper the evacuation and repatriation of the OFWs." Nonetheless, Senate investigators proceeded with the probe and learned that there were P11 billion OWWA funds deposited in several banks. The question is: Was the money in the bank vaults? If there was indeed money in the banks, why did the government ask Congress for supplemental budget to fund the evacuation? Is it plausible then that the fund existed only on paper or made to exist on paper?
At about the same time, several advocacy groups demanded that the Commission on Audit (COA) conduct an audit on the OWWA fund amidst claims by OWWA officials that the fund was still "intact." However, no one in OWWA could produce any financial report that showed the status of the fund. The last known figure was given by Roque. He said that as of the end of 2004 the fund stood at P8.1 billion. Since one million OFWs leave for overseas placement every year and each paying US$25 to the OWWA fund upon departure, the OWWA fund should be at least P11 billion today. That's a lot of moolah for the "robbing hoods" to plunder. As Bragas-Regalado said, the OFWs are the "milking cows" of the government.
The other day, I received an email from Ding Bagasao, Chairman of the Economic Resource Center for Overseas Filipinos (ERCOF), informing me of the work of two Filipino-American fellows, Dovelyn Ranveig Agunias of the Migration Policy Institute and Neil Ruiz of the Brookings Institution, both of whom are based in Washington, DC. According to Bagasao, their paper, "Protecting Overseas Workers: Lessons and Cautions from the Philippines," will be the subject of a public forum in Manila, Philippines on the occasion of International Migrants Day on December 18, 2007. ERCOF will be a co-convenor of the forum. This would be a grand opportunity for the OFWs to air their grievances against government policies that denied them their rights.
The OWWA fund is the world's largest migrant welfare fund. However, as indicated by the COA audit for the 2005 year-end, there were allegations of juggling of OWWA funds. It's high time that reforms should -- nay, must -- be instituted in OWWA. It is ironic, however, that the government which benefits from the OFWs' remittances -- $15 billion this year -- has callously neglected them and turned a blind eye and deaf ears to their plight.
(PerryDiaz@gmail.com)