“ALL politics is local,” Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill often stressed.

You see that in Mayor Tomas Osmeña displaying an iron girp on City Hall, despite cancer, and Vice Mayor Mike Rama’s damage control for wobbly 2010 plans.

Osmeña partisans exude a business-as-usual façade in yellow ribbons and skinheads. “The bald lead the bald,” they joke in Cabadiangan. But “currents of change” swirl below the surface. In politics, as in life, what is most predictable is the unpredictable.

Panagbenga 2009 blog

Who thought, 52 years ago this Tuesday, that Ramon Magsaysay wouldn’t serve a full term? But 15 minutes after takeoff from the old Lahug airport, that certitude lay shattered in the crash of the president’s C-47 on Mount Manunggal.

Osmeña corralled 77 of 80 barangays. He brooks no dissent to orders, even whims. Who thought, a few weeks back, that errant lymph nodes and bladder would compel him to let go of his fiefdom?

“Man is here today and gone tomorrow,” Thomas a Kempis wrote. “And when he is out of sight, he is also out of mind.”

We knock on wood that Osmeña’s April operation goes well. But in surgery, as in politics, what is most predictable can sometimes be the unpredictable. Whatever the operating room outcome, Osmeña must leave City Hall by 2010. Like it or not, the law stipulates term limits.

Leaders worth the name look beyond themselves and their short tenure of office. They identify and nurture growth of others—not their wives or children—for the day when they will have passed on.

Osmeña’s autocratic rule, however, saw nothing beyond Osmeña. He squashed aspirants. “Nothing grows under the shade of a banyan tree.” The old Pilipino proverb says.

Will Osmeña “go quietly in the night?” Not likely. That’s why speculation persists that the mayor’s wife Margot will run in 2010 despite her statement: “My only enemy right now is cancer… I don’t have time for politics.”

The litmus test comes after April surgery. “Can Osmeña rub off his own patina on the lady?,” ask the bookies. “No spouse of a Durano ever ran for office,” they note.

“Is Osmeña’s younger sister, meanwhile, altering the landscape? Georgia discusses with key figures on issues confronting a treeless city of potholes, water shortages, shabby schools and shabbier medical care. Cebuanos are saddled with the highest per capita foreign loan repayment rates. They’re stained with a legacy of 183 vigilante executions. “Why not?,” Georgia replies when asked if she’ll run.

Two tough Osmeña ladies battling for City Hall, as flabby men look on from the outside, make for a catfight royale. Presiding over Capitol is Gwen Garcia, a svelte woman that a corpulent mayor mistook for a pushover. “Cutie” del Mar seeks the post occupied by the simpatico Deputy Speaker Raul del Mar. And the barangay captain with a backbone is a woman: Mary Ann delos Santos of Lahug. Cherchez la femme, the French say.

Investment in education and health are the “two pillar of development.” They mobilize an individual’s productive capacities. “The third pillar for 21st century advance is citizen participation,” UN’s Human Development Report notes. “People must have a say in decisions that affect their lives.”

The Osmeña regime flubs in all three. Elite hostaging of government remains the bane of today’s society. “We need to have a much larger sense of common responsibility for those suffering from the weakness, corruption, cruelty and disorder of bad government,” the late John Kenneth Gailbraith of Harvard wrote in “The Affluent Society.”

(juanlmercado@gmail.com)