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Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Taneo: Caught off guard
By Paul J. Taneo
Free-for-all
JonathanGuardo should by now know the real meaning of the cynical adage: “No good deed goes unpunished.”
After serving as chairman of the Cebu City Sports Commission (CCSC) for four years, topping it off with a lead role in the successful co-hosting of the Southeast Asian Games, Guardo found himself shoved aside not so gently, accused of misuse of City Government funds for the SEA Games.
It wasn’t just loose allegations from anonymous tongues, it was direct accusations from one of the sharpest tongues in Cebu – Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s.
When your boss puts you down publicly there are only two things you can do – quit or wait to be fired.
In the game of upmanship, the verdict is still out as to who was quicker, Guardo quitting or Osmeña firing.
Graft. The word is vile, sometimes paired with the just as wicked word corruption.
After four long years of sweet cooperation and declarations of support and admiration, from pats on the back, Osmeña suddenly turned around, with a whack on the back of the head. An action that followed closely at the heels of the mayor insulting the Ad Congress that the City also hosted last year. It seemed Osmeña was in a particularly sour mood for months on end in 2005.
Saying we don’t need you and saying you committed graft both cut deep.
If what Guardo did was indeed graft, getting a” lump sum and then he reimburses it. It’s what you call co-mingling of funds, exchanging your funds with government funds,” the mayor should have said so two years ago when Cebu sent a delegation to the International Children’s Games in Cleveland, Ohio when Guardo added his money to the delegation’s budget so it could join. The money to be reimbursed after the ICG.
Even if that is graft, that is the most benign form of graft, digging into your own pockets to make sure a government function pushes through and hoping you get repaid. And it wasn’t just peanuts that Guardo shelled out. We heard it was to the tune of P1 million for the ICG and P2 million for the SEA Games.
The timing and motivation of Osmeña’s sacking of Guardo is suspicious. Suppositions are rife that Osmeña, after gotten wind of Guardo’s plans to run for Congress in the South district against his pal Rep. Tony Cuenco, the mayor showed on whose side he is on and campaigned against Guardo this early.
Others had suspected that an elected City official who had long made known his desire for Guardo’s CCSC post had used his moneyed backer, who is an Osmeña backer, to pry Guardo off his seat so he could take over. The headlines yesterday relating to the new man the mayor had appointed to replace Guardo had confirmed this particular suspicion.
And Guardo came out less restrained this time. He said that the man who took over him won’t really function as CCSC chair, he will delegate that job to the long-serving coach of his basketball team, the M. Lhuillier Jewelers, Cebu’s “winningest basketball team.” That man, to those who have been living under a rock the last two decades, is City Councilor Raul Alcoseba, whom the mayor appointed to be Lhuillier’s vice chairman.
Now why would the CCSC chairman need a vice chairman? Guardo did not have one during his exemplary term. Perhaps it’s a subtle way of saying that Mr. Lhuillier, a very busy and very wealthy businessman, really can’t spare the time to wade into the murky waters of sports and politics and he will have to let his man do it for him. Enter Alcoseba.
When Alcoseba was a newly-minted councilor, a local sportswriter told me that the councilor had promised him a juicy position in the CCSC if he was to be its chairman. If Alcoseba is true to his word, images of the fox in the chicken coop are hard to shake off.
(paulotaneo@yahoo.com)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (January 11, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
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