Friday, January 05, 2007 Malilong: Time for Oliva to leave By Frank Malilong Jr. The Other Side
CEBU City Schools Superintendent Leonilo Oliva confessed to feeling like a dog being shooed away, said a Sun.Star Cebu report on Saturday. A couple of days later, he filed a case to question his transfer to Lapu-Lapu City. The dog is fighting back.
I do not think that Oliva does not really want to move out. He knows that his relationship with the city mayor has made his continued stay in Cebu City untenable. All that he asked for was enough time to prepare for a smoother transition. The request was reasonable. What damage would the city superintendent’s office or the public schools systems have suffered had he been given five or ten days to pack his things?
The court case is more like a protest to the shabby treatment that he got. But if I were Oliva, I’d withdraw it. There is no sense in expanding your circle of enemies especially when the new additions happen to be your colleagues, or worse, your superiors. This early, he should also seriously consider the argument that the secretary of education, who signed his transfer order, is an alter ego of the President.
If it’s any consolation to Oliva, there is life after public office. In the 1980s, my friend Bienvenido Mabanto Jr., who was then a Cebu City assistant fiscal, gained the ire of Mayor Tomas Osmeña over a case the fiscal was handling.
So strong was the mayor’s anger he hounded Jun out of Cebu City. Mabanto landed in Mandaue like a turtle thrown to the water. He is now the Mandaue City prosecutor and, if rumors are true, Mayor Teddy Ouano’s real trusted legal adviser.
In the early ‘90s when Tingting de la Serna was elected governor, he wanted to replace Bienvenido Cobarde as provincial attorney. Benjie initially demurred, saying that he was protected by civil service rules and regulations but he eventually gave in. Not long after, he was appointed Lapu-Lapu City Regional Trial Court judge, a position more prestigious than being provincial attorney.
It is not unusual to grow a certain attachment to your position. But as a career official, Oliva is doubtless aware that no one has a permanent claim to an office; that being transferred is a regular and expected occurrence in any employment.
He would probably have preferred to leave under favorable circumstances but there are things over which we, human beings have no control. For example, who would have thought that an endeavor as noble as teaching the students moral values through a Life in the Spirit Seminar would be marred by the actions of a priest with runaway libido?
Who could have imagined that His Reverend would disappear at the first hint of trouble and leave his superiors in the archdiocese and the likes of Oliva and the Oasis of Love to suffer the consequences of his sexual predilection?
But as a deeply spiritual person, Oliva should learn to trust that all these things happen for a purpose. And also that for every door that closes, a window opens.
