Friday, April 25, 2008 Malilong: Quarrel in Mandaue By Frank Malilong The Other Side
MANDAUE is supposed to be an urbanized city but its officials are behaving like small town politicians (with apologies to the latter). They seem absolutely incapable of rising above partisan politics.
Never have I seen a local government so polarized between two factions and never has there been a more protracted post-election dogfight than in that city. The residents surely deserve better.
We do not begrudge the opposition-dominated City Council’s right to fiscalize as in fact it is their duty to check any abuse by their chief executive. But first, they have to acknowledge, even if grudgingly, what the lawyers call the basic premises, which, in their case, is that Jonas Cortes, and no longer Thadeo Ouano, is the duly elected mayor.
Cortes did not even enjoy the luxury of a brief political honeymoon as his detractors began swinging at him before he could warm his seat at City Hall. They opposed him at every turn, even denying him the courtesy that an election winner is usually entitled to: that of appointing his own people to confidential positions.
Not that Cortes is himself blameless. He has allowed himself to be baited by his enemies such as when he personally led the assault on the old campus of the Mandaue City College. His own people could have done as well in dislodging an insubordinate college president and his student sympathizers from the premises.
If the mayor wanted to establish a reputation for decisiveness, he chose the wrong platform. Mandaue needs a hands-on mayor, yes, but a good leader knows not only how to execute but also when to delegate the execution of a decision.
The City Council, in typical knee-jerk reaction, condemned Cortes, calling his action savage. The use of intemperate language by honorable gentlemen of an august body is unfortunate but the mayor cannot deny that somehow, he asked for it.
In the meantime, the students suffer. They now have to choose which campus to go to: the Eversley Child Sanitarium that 6th Dist. Rep. Nerissa Soon-Ruiz offered as sanctuary to the deposed MCC president and his sympathizers or the Mandaue City Cultural and Sports Complex that the mayor has chosen as temporary site.
A sanitarium is supposed to house sick people while a cultural and sports complex is a venue for basketball games, boxing matches and beauty pageants, among others. How the students ended up reporting to either sheds light on the plight of Mandaue City residents.
The majority councilors should rethink their strategy in dealing with the mayor. They have to do away with the “puppets on a string” tag that had been, fairly or unfairly, pinned on them. They can’t continue to act like obstructionists without eventually earning the people’s ire. That would be political suicide. It could also prove fatal to the comeback aspirations of the family that holds the strings, the Ouanos.
On the other hand, Cortes should also do something to correct the impression that he is insecure, if not outright vindictive, by running after his political opponents and trying to obliterate everything that reminds the people of his predecessors, with, understandably, the exception of his own father.
Old-timers remember the old Mandaue with fondness: peaceful, warm and hospitable. Hopefully, they’re not just things of the past.
