Punchline
Foolish brinkmanship
By Ermin Garcia Jr.
IT looks like Dagupan Mayor Benjie Lim’s “shared responsibility” vision is now nothing more than a quote better left forgotten. The “divided responsibility” is already there for everyone to see.
Just when I thought lessons about good governance have been learned after the city budget was passed, another foolish game of brinkmanship ensued. It followed a string of word-war that started with the tricycle franchise. Then came the “gag order” preventing department heads to be accountable to the sanggunian. The “push-and-shove” tactics saw their worst during the budget deliberations.
Today, we are seeing a new battlefront, courtesy of Dagupan Councilor Brian Lim. He glibly pushed the envelope with his “Put up or shut up” challenge to his colleagues in the city council who failed to show up during the first round of ‘Media in Action’ debate series on the budget organized by the Pangasinan Press Club two weeks ago. Perhaps it was hubris or plain chutzpa or immaturity that prompted the mayor’s bright-haired son to dare them to a legal battle inside the ombudsman’s arena but the fact is, his ill-advised challenge has been accepted!
What the young Lim apparently failed to see while echoing his father’s sentiments was an earlier inclination of the majority in the city council to give his father the benefit of the doubt, and therefore decided not to show up at the scheduled debate. Unfortunately, his brattish side obviously got the better of him by exploiting what he perceived as a sign of weakness. How pitifully wrong he was.
As can be gleaned from their statements made in the last round of the PPC’s debate series where Brian and his group defaulted this time, VM Belen Fernandez and the majority councilors indicated that nobody was keen on sending a complaint before the ombudsman for the two irregularities they said they discovered during the budget deliberation. They were just not willing to draw blood or create a spectacle that would further strain official relations between them and the city hall. Perhaps if only Mr. Brian had taken time to read the signs on the wall with a magnifying glass, he would have been more statesmanlike in his response to pointed questions thrown his way. But no, he chose to waylay those who stood up to his dad.
Had he been more circumspect in his response, his father would not face the prospect today of being the first city mayor to be unseated for alleged irregularities committed under his watch.
But I guess that would be too much to expect of the young man. He has only known one brand of politics, his dad’s.
But the next question is: will the majority keep its word? I don’t doubt that Mr. Brian is praying mighty hard that they won’t. He will keep his fingers crossed that his colleagues on the opposite side will eventually decide to play trapo-litics and forget about good governance.
Will they? Let’s see what stuffs they are made of. I know now that they don’t have the killers’ instinct but hopefully they have the mettle to stand up for what is right all the way.
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KINDERGARTEN FOLLY. The Lim administration has shown the way how pre-schoolers in public schools should be accommodated next school year.
While the recent the inauguration of the brand new play-classrooms and playground for the pre-schoolers in Barangay Bonuan Gueset showcases the best there is, it also points to how pathetically imprudent our national government is in a bid to rush its foolish idea of a mandatory pre-school education.
There’s a chorus of “Yes, we can” for it. I can imagine them toasting to “If Dagupan can make it, so can others. It’s a matter of energizing partnership between local government units and the private sector…. blah-blah” This is what national government does very well – visioning for the future, and little else.
Yet, they fail to see how much in resources the government would need to deliver on the “ideal” situation. A first draft of estimate of the city project will be enough to impress upon the bright boys at the DepEd to realize that their idea of a mandatory Kindergarten education is one big blooper. The city’s new kinder-classroom-playground should serve as a reality check to DepEd’s delusions.
As Mayor Lim has demonstrated, the only way the pre-school mandatory program can be implemented with desired results is to engage the private sector as he had initiated with the Universal Harvester Inc.
I cannot for the life of me see how the national government can believe it can support and allocate more resources for pre-schoolers when the classroom shortage for grade school and high school students is becoming more acute each year. Top it with the shortage of qualified teachers in primary and secondary schools who can teach the basic subjects in the vernacular using English textbooks prepared by sophomoric English instructors.
To even believe that there are enough qualified pre-school teachers is simply surreal. Educating pre-schoolers require a different discipline, training and orientation unless the dreamers at the DepEd believe that pre-school teachers are no different from baby-sitters or yayas or day-care center attendants.
Then there is the factor about parents who have to fend for their enrolled grade and high-schooler who are already in school. To have to send their 5-6 year old to school too means allocating more for their baon and transportation (if the kid cannot walk the 2-kilometer distance).
Mandatory kindergarten? Perish the thought.
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POWER-MAD KAPITANS. My city hall mole, ‘Adonis’, alerted me about plans of a number of barangay kapitans in Dagupan led by Liga ng mg Barangay president Guillermo Vallejos to use P50,000 of the P250,000 allocated to them recently by the city council for – hold your breath – a pleasure “bonding” trip to several cities in Asia being organized by city hall in preparation for 2013 elections.
If Mr. Vallejos and his ilk believe they can get away with it without being accountable for the misuse of the fund, they got another thing coming. They could make history yet as the first barangay kapitans in the city to be unseated and jailed for malversation of public funds.
I hope ‘Adonis’ got it wrong but he’s usually reliable.
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“KUNWARI GANITO”. Last week I had to vent my frustration with PNoy’s proclivity to be popular by doing nothing. I cited his quotable quote for media purposes, his endorsement of the RH bill “at the risk of being excommunicated” before graduating UP Diliman students. The agenda was obviously aimed at projecting himself as a no-nonsense guy with a political will. It could have worked for him if he had shown resoluteness by promptly certifying the RH bill as urgent. He didn’t and refused to do so. Worse, it showed his ignorance of how and when excommunication is applied under the Roman Catholic Church’s dogma. Nobody told him that by opting to support RH bill, it is not one of the few grounds for excommunication. Kunwari?
Here is another snippet of PNoy’s reality show “Kunwari Ganito!” To project a hands-on President, “kunwari” he bewailed the absence of police patrol in Luneta during the Holy Week, it being a potential target for terrorists, he warned. And to establish his rapport with commuters, the President of the Republic, “kunwari” he came out with a solution to the spate of road accidents involving buses. He suggested that two drivers be assigned to each unit. Meanwhile, he dilly-dallies on the fuel-pricing crisis.
Through it all, he hopes to see his popular rating get a bump without articulating a vision for the country. I’m afraid it will take more “kunwaris” for people to believe he is what he pretends to be. Tsk-tsk.
P.S. Our people are still waiting with bated breath on what his vision is like for us after he decreed “Wala nang wang-wang!”
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