Punchline
The stupid script
By Ermin Garcia Jr.
THE media lapdogs of Dagupan Mayor Benjie Lim were frothing in the mouth early on trying to exculpate the latter from any responsibility for the foiled attempt to cash in quickly and recklessly on the forthcoming Bangus Festival.
They badly wanted the Dagupeños to believe that Mr. Lim knew nothing about the plan to construct stalls for the Baratillo event of the festival. How was it possible that the mayor could not possibly know about the mad rush to construct stalls in the area just a stone’s throw away from his office?
They were naïve to believe they can turn things around by presenting a scapegoat, the market supervisor, who was pulled out of the hat to accept the responsibility for “authorizing” the construction of the stalls around the St. John Cathedral.
A market administrator has no authority or the budget to construct any stall inside or outside the market without explicit delegated authority from the mayor’s office or as may be mandated by a city ordinance. His only mandated task is to collect fees and ensure that there is order in the market, period. So what was that all about?
But assuming the stupid script was true, why hasn’t Mr. Mayor sanctioned the presumptuous market administrator for authorizing the illegal act that caused him immense embarrassment before the archbishop? Shouldn’t have the mayor suspended the market administrator outright for violating a city ordinance? From the looks of it, the compromised administrator was instead given a bonus for his “courageous and humanitarian act” act! Gosh!
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ARCHBISHOP’S MESSAGE. It’s comical seeing the mayor’s lapdogs falling over themselves in justifying the gaffe by pointing out that the administrator did it for, read this, “humanitarian reasons.” Did they say that so he cannot be sanctioned? Give the people a break.
The pea-brained guys who scripted the whole thing surely don’t deserve the hefty retainers they get from Mr. Lim. They make the mayor look so stupid when he is not.
Thank God for Archbishop Soc Villegas who refused to be pushed around even by Mayor Lim. His question to BSL “Is there no God in this government” certainly jolted the mayor and the rest of the gang to force them to pull back, with a scapegoat in tow. So, in case Mayor Lim and his fellow conspirators missed the point, the good archbishop’s message was plain and simple – Is there no end to your greed?
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REFUSING TO BE ACCOUNTABLE. For the past two years, Mr. Lim and his appointed chairmen of the city fiesta and Bangus Festival never reported the revenues earned by the city from these events. To this day, they continue to refuse to account to the people how much the city could have earned for development projects in the city.
What further grates Dagupeños nerves, is having to find out that Mr. Lim and his fiesta organizers did not even have the decency to cover the high electricity costs incurred during the last fiesta celebration. Because of the deficit in 2012, the costs were routinely charged to the city’s 2013 budget
Mayor Lim could have mitigated the case for the city by reporting and remitting all the proceeds from the fiesta but he didn’t and refuses to do so to this day. Even Councilor Red Erfe-Mejia, a member of the Madilim and MakuLILMLIM ticket, is mum about the whereabouts of the monies of he collected. People can’t help but wonder how the windfall from the fiesta was shared inside the city hall.
What makes people mad as hell is the refusal of Mr. Lim to heed the people’s call for transparency about the fiesta and Bangus Festival proceeds like he is not at all accountable to them.
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ABETTING CORRUPTION. For our readers to have an idea how much is being pocketed by the racketeers in the city hall for the past two years, proceeds from annual fiestas of much smaller towns with more modest activities, enabled them to own brand new fire trucks, embark on expanded health projects, additional classrooms, new beautification projects, etc.
It is, therefore important for all prospective commercial sponsors of the Bangus Festival to demand for official receipts of the city government, and not accept a simple letter acknowledgement from the organizing committee. They will be abetting corruption if they tolerate this policy of unofficial acknowledgment for their paid fees.
Let’s hope that the stall lessees, business establishments and corporate sponsors this year will cooperate in the people’s campaign for transparency and accountability in the city hall.
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USELSS COVENANT SIGNING. There should be more to the holding of signing of peace covenants, etc. for the election than making it a one-time publicity event for the organizers.
For the past 8 elections, not a few covenants were signed each time and people have since began to be cynical about these. Nobody is taking the covenants seriously because it only served publicity for organizers and candidates, nothing else. Those who sign the covenants are seen violating the terms soon as the signing ceremony is over.
For these ceremonies to mean anything, the organizers should endeavor to make all the signatories accountable by pledging to render a truthful account of the campaign period immediately after the elections.
The candidates who violated the terms of the covenant must be named, published/broadcasted by local media. The same report should be made public in 2016 to remind voters that that the covenant is not merely a scrap paper that organizers prepare and candidates sign just to be ignored shortly after.
If the covenants are not taken seriously by the organizers themselves, they cannot expect to be taken seriously by the candidates and the public. And if nobody is taking it seriously, why do it all?
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SHEER IGNORANCE. I am not surprised that The PUNCH’s Fire player made good on his threat to file libel cases against four broadcast practitioners who dared to besmirch the well-guarded integrity and reputation of Lyceum Northwestern University to make its students and graduates proud.
The four respondents, Orly Navarro, Leu Paragas, Jay Mendoza and Edmund Salacup miserably failed to understand the boundaries of libel and defamatory remarks directed at private persons and institutions. Even worse was the perception of Messers. Paragas and Navarro who reportedly publicly declared in one of their radio programs that their defamatory remarks on air can not be considered libelous because libel only pertains to printed words! God help them!
Their warped and phoney view of press freedom and freedom of speech led them to believe that to be licentious is part of the package. They failed to see that in every freedom there is a limitation and accountability.
Why they allowed city hall occupants to exploit their pathetic ignorance in law as an opportunity to get back at Fire Player Gonz (for openly endorsing Belen Fernandez, not their boss Benjie Lim) without being made liable, is beyond me. Tsk-tsk.
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