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Saturday, August 23, 2003
Editorials: Buying vehicles
Just less than a year before their term ends, City Hall officials—the mayor the vice mayor and the councilors, or at least those identified with the Bando Osmeña-Pundok Kauswagan (BO-PK)—are set to buy vehicles for their own use.
Appropriations like this always make the public jumpy, conjuring questions like: Is there really a need for the vehicles? What kind of vehicles will be bought? Are there priority projects affected by the plan? Who will use the vehicles?
Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña assured that the vehicles won’t be luxurious (although “luxurious” is a relative term, depending on one’s taste). The clarification was apparently made to ease public worry about the purchase.
Actually, the mayor and the councilors are still “brainstorming” over what to buy: four-wheel drive vehicles, sports utility vehicles or others whose total cost would be within the P16 million appropriated for the purpose.
As for necessity, that is something that needs to be assessed objectively. In this, one has to consider the condition of the vehicles being used by the officials concerned.
Purchase of the vehicles can be justified only if the cost of using and maintaining these is already too high the City can save more if it buys new ones. If officials merely want to show off, the plan should be junked immediately (we’re in hard times, aren’t we?).
The purchase should also be weighed in relation to the other problems that need immediate attention from City Hall. (Incidentally, funding basic services, especially in a large constituency, can be considered a bottomless pit.)
Then there’s the aspect of distribution. In normal times, this actually does not pose much problem. The simple rule is that an official should be given the vehicle appropriate for his function and status in the bureaucracy.
The complication comes when that rule is set aside in favor of political vendetta. The mayor, for example, is not inclined to give new vehicles to councilors identified with the opposition Kugi Uswag Sugbo “to give them a taste of their own medicine.”
Mayor’s guts
In his speech recalling the martyrdom of former senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Mayor Tomas Osmeña was quoted as saying: “Some people say, ‘Mayor I like your guts.’ But Ninoy was five times courageous.”
While one should not take away the mayor’s right to compare himself with a hero, some clarification should also be made.
It would be misleading, for example, to compare Osmeña’s so-called “guts” with that of Aquino. The latter’s “guts” was in the matter of facing the odds and not buckling down. Ninoy never backed off from the Marcos dictatorship.
Osmeña’s so-called “guts,” on the other hand, is in the aspect of implementing government policies without fear of repercussions—which would have been admirable had it not been wrongly used.
Much of the guts that the mayor showed thus far took the form of shooing away and berating people he dislikes; ordering the demolition of some sidewalk vendors’ stalls while favoring others; and valiantly defending as “brand new” (even if these were not) dump trucks sold to the City by a political supporter.
Surely, Ninoy didn’t have such “guts.” |
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