It looks like the height of irony for a nation that has “lost” at least P3 trillion or P4 trillion to corrupt activity, which has already received hundreds of millions of US dollars in foreign disaster aid, and in which the all powerful private sector contains at least one entity capable of paying dividends to its shareholders for a single year’s operation of close to $1 billion, to be holding out its begging bowl for over $8 billion of foreign aid to rehabilitate 4 million of its citizens dispossessed by Super Typhoon Yolanda.