Malilong: When lawyers hold elections

Saturday, February 26, 2011

THE noise was many decibels higher than usual in the Capitol between 8 a.m. and 12 noon yesterday even as it was unusually quiet elsewhere in the island. The reason: the lawyers were having their elections.

All the chapters of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines all over the country elect their officers simultaneously on the last Saturday of February every other year. Cebu has two chapters. The bigger one is Cebu City; the other is Cebu, which is also sometimes called the Cebu Province Chapter.

When I was elected president of the Cebu City Chapter in 1987, we had less than a thousand members of which only about 400 voted. The current membership must be two times bigger than during our time and a lot more conscious of their duty to vote, judging by the number of lawyers who showed up yesterday. For all the brickbats and the ridicule that it is regularly subjected to, the legal profession continues to draw many of the best and the brightest of the younger generation.

I have not missed any of the IBP elections since my admission to the bar more than 35 years ago. Ten years ago, I voted with my eldest daughter. Yesterday, I voted with my son, the youngest in the family.

It’s obvious I now belong to the older generation of the profession. Yesterday, many of the faces that I saw were unfamiliar and they addressed me sir, a clear indication of our vast chronological difference.

I was not the only one who experienced the culture shock/generation gap. “I feel out of place,” confessed assistant city prosecutor Gilbert Batayola, one of the stars of our chapter bowling team in the IBP Mini-Olympics which, to my recollection, was last staged about two decades ago. Go, figure.

Most of the lawyers in my generation do not run for IBP office anymore. To us, the elections are more than about voting. It’s about reuniting with friends you haven’t met since two Februarys ago and recalling old times.

The conversation is almost always irreverent even when we are counting the number of friends who have crossed over to the Great Beyond. More than half of the basketball team of my original chapter (Cebu Province) have died and the perennial question that elicits the biggest laugh from among the surviving members is, “who’s next?”

A lot has changed since I first voted. In the past, the elections were held at the Capitol social hall. We would line up from the stairs fronting the Palace of Justice, wait for our turn, cast our votes and go home. There wasn’t much campaigning on election day and only the candidates and a few supporters stayed for the counting.

Yesterday, as in the past three elections, the Capitol compound looked like just any regular polling center. There were sample ballots (that came with a free ball pen--cheap, of course), ushers (mostly pretty ladies) and best of all, a feast, courtesy, I was told, of the candidates who all contributed to a common fund.

I was also told that it was a very tight contest between two camps (one called themselves WISE; the other, REDEEM) but the mood was jovial even among the candidates and their harassed campaigners. We may be competitive and adversarial but we are also very sporting.

Right now, I’m already looking forward to the next IBP elections in February 2013.

(frank.otherside@yahoo.com)