Saturday, September 22, 2007 Ledesma: Is Charlie Mike turning opposition? By Jun Ledesma Sunbursts
IT'S AN innocuous caption to a picture of Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte in intimate conversation with ex-senator Loi Estrada. But the caption even as it is brief elicits a lot of meaning and stories.
I would not blame Mayor Rody if he speaks the emotions of his mind. If I were in his shoes, my subconscious will prod me to say the same thing.
When your perception is that you are close to the seat of power but that power does not have a sense of reciprocity there is really no reason why the alliance should be perpetuated.
Of course this view is strictly personal. Allow me to proceed by citing an example. If I am the mayor of a city where a bridge in a river that runs at the center of my city collapsed causing massive traffic jams and disrupting business and school schedules my instinct would egg me to go ask for help from Malacanang.
Since I consider myself an ally of the President having sided with her through thick and thin my presumption is that she will lend me her ears.
In the case of Mayor Duterte, I knew the President was listening to his urgent appeals. But I don't know whether she heard him. She promised quick solution, a promise that remains hollow, empty.
If I were mayor, six months of waiting for an emergency fix punctuated with a refrain of endless promises and excuses is plain insult. A cruel snub. Meaning the alliance is meaningless. So why should I perpetuate it? I will move on to redeem myself from the insult that debases me before my political constituents.
It is this consciousness of betrayal that must have compelled Mayor Duterte to say that come next elections he might be with the political opposition.
Obviously now, the mayor is about to give up on Malacanang. He is on the brink. I knew that he cannot countenance pretensions and double-speak so there you are.
Malacanang can have its own free time; we just have to endure the indifference of the President on our plight. The little bridge that we asked is too big to be granted. Maybe it's because it's too small they would rather pursue with the scandalous ZTE and CyberEd contracts because these involve billions of pesos and the reward can bring bonanza to the creative architect of what is patently anomalous deal. Isn't this crazy?
Allow me to digress a bit and revisit this smokey mountain in the government. Here is a twin multi-billion contracts all for national broadband projects. One is by DOTC the other by DepEd. Listening to each proponent we are made to believe that they are state of the art.
I understand that to mean it has ample capacities to address what the private telcos cannot provide, although this is just one side of the story. The side of DOTC and DepEd. If you look closely at what is being unraveled in the Senate, what we see these two departments are cooking up are redundant systems.
We the madlang tao are twice screwed. If one considers that there are actually existing government-owned backbone and hardly harnessed private broadband capacities this whole thing about ZTE-NBN and DepEd broadband network is nothing but a broad daylight robbery!
Someone has to hang. Someone has to restore death penalty to put a break to all these treasure hunting activities.
Back to our Mayor Duterte. Frankly I am amazed by his patience with Malacanang as much as I am surprised by the insensitivity of President Arroyo over our simple needs. I feel the pain and anguish of the city mayor for not being able to build that bridge. Sure we can endure the travails of passing through a constricted span of what remains of Bankerohan bridge.
But knowing how quickly they can restore bridges and highways in typhoon-ravaged provinces in Luzon and hearing how eager Malacanang wants to push through with graft-tainted broadband backbones I can only commiserate with the frustration of our city mayor. But then again we have to move on. And so we can only say, "Carry on Charlie Mike."
