Thursday, December 13, 2007 Wenceslao: ‘Maayong laki’ By Bong O. Wenceslao Candid Thoughts
TOO many experts. That’s what a friend muttered when he heard people gang up on the police team whose operation led to the death of PO1 Noriel Luague, an award-winning cop. The team was serving a search warrant on Ramon “Boy” Baclohan in Barangay Zapatera, Cebu City when Baclohan decided to shoot it out with the policemen.
There were lapses in that operation, true, and these were pointed out by Police Regional Office 7 Director Ronald Roderos. Examples: failure to wear bullet-proof vests and Kevlar helmets, lack of well-thought of planning, etc. These were necessary considering the information about Baclohan as being armed and therefore dangerous.
What irritated my friend was that even those who didn’t know about the details of the incident and couldn’t even differentiate police from the military and search warrant from a warrant of arrest immediately played the blame game and lectured the police team involved on what they should have done. Daghang maayong laki, my friend repeated.
Actually, I agree with my friend in a way. I know what it is like to be in an operation that involves armed people; anything can go wrong. And by the time things go wrong, wa nay maayong laki ana. So I would be lenient on the police team, although I would say that it also should look objectively at what happened and learn its lessons.
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I don’t know if the texter, who wanted to be referred to merely as a concerned citizen, is a teacher, but his/her message suggests he/she knows what is going on at the Department of Education (DepEd). The texter’s complaint involved the law authored by former congressman Jose Gullas decentralizing the DepEd payroll system.
“Former congressman Gullas will be jolted by this information that his law regionalizing the DepEd payroll system has been defeated by lenders and cashiers,” the texter said. I find the way the texter worded his/her message difficult to understand but I reckon this was about a linkage between cashiers and lenders that disadvantage teachers.
It has actually been a while since the plight of teachers and the alleged corruption in the DepEd have landed in newspaper pages, giving the impression that all is already well in that department. I think that teachers, if they are really encountering problems in the manner their pay is being disbursed, should come out in the open and complain.
