Thursday, June 14, 2007 Editorials: Deceiving Lahug residents
THE school building project at the Lahug Elementary School is back on track, but was Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s announced reason for his turnaround an honest one?
The mayor ordering the building contractor to go back to the Lahug school after he stopped work on the structure can actually be subject of various interpretations.
But we can limit that to two, including Osmeña’s claim that his earlier threat to scuttle the project was a ploy to make Lahug residents aware of his projects in the area.
Turnaround
Let us leave that interpretation for a while and proceed to the other and more plausible one: that he caved in to the widespread criticism of his act.
The mayor may not admit it but before his turnaround on the issue too much pressure was building up for him to give the school building project the green light.
Not only were Osmeña’s detractors scoring points against him using the issue that scuttling the project would hurt the school children more, his allies also acted uneasy.
Vice Mayor Michael Rama and some councilors may not have openly contradicted the mayor, probably out of fear, but they obviously felt the public pressure.
Besides, some lawyers were itching to file a case against Osmeña had he pursued his threat to transfer funds intended for the Lahug school building project to Talamban.
Scheming politician
Given his nature, though, Osmeña was not expected to admit that the widespread criticism of his act forced him to relent, thus that “ploy” claim.
But the problem with that claim is that it portrayed him as a scheming politician, one who does not mind fooling his constituents to achieve a political goal.
Or how would people take his insistence that he “never intended to remove the funding” for the project and that he just wanted to get the Lahug resident’s attention?
A responsible public official does not conjure ghosts, spark some uproar and spread worries among the people, including school children, just to make a point.
The mayor could just have been truthful and nothing would have been deducted from people’s appreciation of his decision to allow work on the building to continue.
