Tuesday, November 28, 2006 Editorials: PNP Chief Calderon’s belief
STATEMENTS by Philippine National Police (PNP) Chief Oscar Calderon and Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña on Malacañang’s amended holiday declaration for the duration of next month’s Asean summit showed differing approaches to the same issue.
While Osmeña criticized the watered down declaration that now applies only to student and government employees, Calderon was more open-minded.
Both the PNP chief and the mayor acknowledged the extra burden, on the traffic and on the effort to fully secure the Asean summit delegates, of employees going to and from private establishments that are exempted from the holiday order.
But Calderon apparently considered the burden a consequence of the effort to balance our hosting of the event with the need not to overly disrupt Cebu’s normal life.
His view was a recognition that while the ideal setup would have been to turn Metro Cebu into a ghost town, as Osmeña had been pushing when he suggested the four-day holiday, that would be difficult to do for a bustling metropolis, an economic hub.
And there’s one other crucial difference in the viewpoints of Calderon and Osmeña, and this is Calderon’s belief in the willingness of the Cebuanos to cooperate.
In a sense, Osmeña sees the ordinary Cebuanos as mere objects, or worse, consider their presence as a hosting problem or hindrance while Calderon views them as potential allies in the successful hosting of the summit.
It is a wonder then why an official who is not from Cebu would have a better appreciation of what ordinary Cebuanos can do for the summit than our local officials.
Lack of transparency
The Cebu Archdiocese may have investigated the controversial Life in the Spirit Seminar at the Abellana National School and sanctioned the priest accused of “touching” students during confession.
But the problem is in the lack of transparency, as shown by the refusal to identify the priest, which affects public perception on the manner the probe was done.
Admittedly, there is logic in withholding from the public the name of the priest and the result of the investigation—shielding the accused from ridicule is one.
But the secretive policy that is also being used in the archdiocese’s investigation of other erring priests — the cases of Fr. Joey Belciña, Msgr. Constantino Diotay and Fr. Domingo Tapic, being the more recent — will always raise suspicions of whitewash.
