IT is proving to be a mismatch. For the second straight time in less than a month, Mayor Tomas Osmeña outwitted the political opposition in a political battle. The first one was on May 14 when he engineered a massive rout of Barug-PDP Laban- Team Rama in the barangay and SK elections. He followed it up with another runaway victory for his bets in the election of officers of the city’s SK Federation the other day.
It will not stop there. There’s an election for the Association of Barangay Councils (ABC) coming up and the mayor has declared that he’s not taking any chances, meaning he will continue to campaign for Franklin Ong as replacement for Philip Zafra. In the meantime, the opposition cannot even decide who between former mayor Mike Rama and Vice Mayor Edgar Labella should be calling the shots.
They have to make that decision sooner than later. They cannot continue pretending that they are better off with Rama and Labella acting like husband and wife (Rama’s description) because it is confusing their followers. They have to draw the line even if it means, pursuing Rama’s analogy, getting divorced.
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Cell phone thefts must be happening by the dozens, if not by the hundreds, in this text-messaging-crazy country every day. It is not news anymore. But when the complainant is a congressman, the accused is a former congressman and the theft is alleged to have been committed in Congress itself, it is headline stuff.
Such is the case of Jacinto Paras, a former representative of Negros Oriental and ironically, a top officer of the Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption, who is accused by Akbayan party list Rep. Tom Villarin of stealing his iPhone during a congressional hearing last March.
But why would a cabinet official (he is a labor undersecretary) steal a phone even if it happens to be the high-end iPhone X? To extract information, Villarin claims. Malicious, Paras replies.
The former solon said he picked up the iPhone X by accident when he went to another hearing and must have left it there until House security officers found it. I find the excuse easier to believe than the one offered by the cattle rustler who claimed that he did not intend to steal the carabao, the animal just followed when he pulled the rope. Paras’s story is consistent with human experience.
So, and this is the bigger story, why should an honorable gentleman falsely accuse another honorable gentleman of committing a crime against him right inside their august house? In fact, why should he accuse him at all, falsely or otherwise? Couldn’t they have settled this between themselves like, well, honorable gentlemen?
Paras says the case against him, apart from being malicious, is politically motivated. He might not have intended it this way but he just delivered the strongest condemnation yet of the current state of politics in the country. Have its practitioners gone that low?
I have witnessed people accuse public officials of dishonesty, of stealing their money, and of robbing the country blind. But stealing a cell phone is an accusation that, until this, was unheard of. It couldn’t just be politics. I do not know Villarin but I do not think he is crazy enough to try to score points against someone who is not even a political rival by accusing him of helping himself to Villarin’s phone. There has to be another story or at least another reason and we want to know what it is.