Editorial
Tough love
A TOUGHER Mayor Belen Fernandez seems to be emerging. And it’s about time.
Last week, she — finally — gave an order to demolish all remaining fish pens in Dagupan’s abused rivers that were allowed a grace period for the owners to harvest their stock and then voluntary dismantle the structures themselves by the end of April. The mayor has also directed the creation of a task force that will make accountable the non-government organizations and fiesta/festival committees who happily received a chunk of the people’s money through the city government under former Mayor Benjamin Lim but have not bothered to report on how these were spent.
The city government should learn its lesson by now that opportunists and lawbreakers do not deserve leniency. The fish open operators sensed weakness on the part of the Fernandez administration after the latter agreed to a continued moratorium for “humane” reasons; it made them feel that the local government simply does not have what it takes to stop them.
Fernandez should not stop with the dismantling, which costs the city funds and manpower hours. Those who failed and refused to voluntarily dismantle their own structures after the April 30 deadline should be charged in court. Failing this, the Belen administration can expect more abuses in the future by opportunists without fear of losing anything.
The task force that will look into unliquidated funds, meanwhile, must not dilly-dally in its investigation lest the culprits do not take them seriously and the public loses faith.
It’s called tough love in parenting when children, particularly teenagers and young adults, are given real life lessons on the meaning of responsibility. It’s the same in good public management — tough love entails concrete actions that send out the lessons of social equality, transparency and accountability.
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Public property
IF Justice Secretary Leila de Lima has not yet revealed the contents of the so-called Napoles List to the public, her stubbornness should easily rank as the 8th wonder of the world. She doesn’t own the document, by golly. It is public property by virtue of Janet Napoles’s wish to “tell all” before she went under the knife.
De Lima had been handed the document and henceforth designated the messenger of news good or bad that the public deserves to know. We insist Napoles did not tell De Lima to evaluate the document before its contents could be bared to the public. Doesn’t De Lima get it? Napoles merely entrusted the document to her and we even doubt if she told De Lima she had full powers over it. The more De Lima delays revealing its contents, the more the people will believe that Justice Secretary is trying to “sanitize” the document to protect her Boss P-Noy’s allies who might have been implicated in the P10-billion pork barrel scam.
Document detained is document demeaned.
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