Louie Montalbo
Professor in Leadership and Management, Ateneo Graduate School of Business
Associate Director, Ateneo Leaders for Health Program
“Please do something about the situation in ULTRA. This is a disaster waiting to happen.”
I sent a text like this to someone from ABS CBN as early as 8 pm, Friday night. I live right across the gate of ULTRA and saw how the crowd grew. As early as Wednesday night, people were beginning to gather around the stadium. By Thursday, the line was already snaking around ULTRA, sometimes reaching as far as the entrance of St. Paul.
The crowd that gathered in ULTRA was the Anawim of the Bible. A friend of mine who first saw the crowd thought that they were victims of a fire. They looked that desolate, that desperate. That those behind the show simply allowed old women, children, mothers carrying babies to sleep on sidewalks, braving the cold nights, with little food, and meager toilet facilities, is as much a scandal as the stampede itself. (Apparently, the network is used to such a scene since on a daily basis, those who want to enter Wowowee camp out around the compound of ABS CBN.)
Seeing the large crowd gathering in front of ULTRA that Friday night, I assessed that unless something is done to control the people waiting for the opening of the show, people will get hurt. Unfortunately, tragically, I was correct. That I did not exert more effort to find others to intervene that evening continues to haunt me.
I’m sure there were security officers detailed near the gate of ULTRA. But other than steel railings that kept people in line, I saw very little presence of officials making sure that the lines were organized. By midnight, the lines that were formed during the past days began to spill over the roads such that those entering the village where I lived could not bring in their vehicles and were forced to walk.
That many of those killed were old women can be partly explained by the fact that those in front were likely those that began to camp there as early as Wednesday. This means that by Saturday morning, they were probably weak from hunger and lack of sleep. The force of the pressing crowd behind them was too much for their physical and mental condition to resist.
Could anything have been done to avoid what happened? Of course the benefit of hindsight is always 20/20. But if someone like me had somehow foreseen it, I don’t know how those behind the show couldn’t. Couldn’t they have realized that once the gates opened, there would be a violent rush to enter? That the capacity of the stadium cannot accommodate everyone? That they should have allowed people to slowly trickle in as early as Friday? That they should have fielded more people not to secure the facility, but to PROTECT THE PEOPLE?
As we deem it necessary to make those in public offices accountable for their acts, so should we when those in the private sector, whether by commission or omission, cause undue harm to others. I will not even begin to comment on the conflicting interests behind giving prizes in a show like Wowowee.
Why am I writing this? Partly it is to purge some of the guilt I feel for not doing enough (like a typical middle class, I forgot about it once it was out of my view and got distracted with the other concerns of my life.) Partly, it is to communicate how badly I’ve been feeling about the situation. Watching how the network’s shows interpret the entire event does not help me feel better about it.
While those behind the show will have to be taken into account about the stampede, I think that the gathering of all those people for three days to get a crack, a slim crack, at a prize that will improve their lives, is a serious and shameful indictment of all of us. (It was ironic that these people were camped in an area where there are posh villages a few kilometers away.) If you saw the faces of those people, you will wonder how any of us can live with our quiet comfortable lives with such dejection and deprivation right in front of us. Where has our Christianity gone when there are still millions in our country who are like those 70 people who were killed last Saturday morning? Where are we, what are we doing, such that those who are poor pin their hopes on a celebrity like Willie Revillame?
Over and above the accountability of the network, again, we, all of us, are accountable for each of the deaths of the ULTRA stampede.
I wish that this accounting will cause us deep and tremendous anguish. Unfortunately, in all likelihood, once the images of the dead disappear from our screens, I, you, most of us will again forget them. We will go on with our quiet comfortable lives. We will again act, work, live, as if everyone can spend a hundred bucks just to enjoy a cup of frothy frappucino.
Even now, I am watching 12 celebrities begin their lives in the house of Kuya.
Uploaded 8 February 2006.
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