HE chose to keep quiet when President Duterte publicly excoriated and threatened to slap him if their paths should cross. He helped broker an agreement that would allow some 4,000 residents to acquire the land on which their houses are built inside the military reservation in Apas. He organized an estimated 6,000 habal-habal drivers so that they could assist in maintaining peace and order in the city. And only recently, he offered free bus rides on certain routes to BPO workers from midnight to early morning.
Mayor Tomas Osmeña has made savvy moves and done the right things leading to the May 2019 elections. He knows how immensely popular Duterte is even in Cebu City and that it would be politically risky, perhaps even suicidal, to tussle with the President and enrage his followers. So he kept his mouth shut--even refused to talk to the media--even as the President continued to mercilessly lambast him.
The 4,000 Apas informal settlers, the 6,000 habal-habal drivers, the BPO employees and their families constitute a huge bloc of voters that in a tight contest, which his reelection bid against Vice Mayor Edgar Labella is shaping up to be, could be a deciding factor. Osmeña will probably deny that his initiatives were politically motivated but, planned or not, a political windfall from any or all of them is a realistic possibility.
It is therefore surprising that Osmeña would let his emotions get the better of him and commit an egregious blunder while he was on a roll. I’m referring to his decision to limit the grant of allowances from the City Government only to policemen who are voters and residents of Cebu City. That itself is a redundancy: for one to become a voter of a locality, he must be residing there.
Osmeña’s new rule on the eligibility of recipients likewise applies to employees of other law enforcement agencies like the National Bureau of Investigation, the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency and the Maritime Command, but it is obvious that his real target is the police; the rest are collateral damage. To say that his relationship with the Philippine National Police (PNP) has soured is an understatement and nowhere is it more acidic than with Cebu City Police Director Royina Garma.
Garma has loudly protested Osmeña’s new policy, and the latter’s camp has responded by asking the police official not to take it personally. I do not think that Garma’s howl is over the potential loss of her own allowance, which, I was told, is not really much but the possible demoralization that could result from the unwarranted reclassification of policemen stationed in the city.
A review of the law that encourages local government units to grant financial assistance to national government officials and employees should be helpful. Section 458 (1, xi) of the Local Government Code says that the Sangguniang Panlungsod shall “when the finances of the City Government allow, provide for additional allowances and other benefits to judges ... and other national government officials stationed in or assigned to the city.”
Two things stand out in the above-mentioned law: one, it is the city council, not the mayor, who provides for the allowances when in their judgment, the city’s finances allow it, and two, the allowances are to be given to the officials who are stationed in or assigned to the city.
Given the clear and unmistakable language of the law, can the mayor unilaterally ignore it by providing the additional qualifications that the national official should be a voter and a resident of the city?
But more than just the legality is the issue of correctness. If, as widely believed, Osmeña’s new policy is dictated by his disappointment with the police, some of whom may indeed have been responsible for a lot of misdeeds that we have witnessed in the city, is it correct to assume that these erring cops were those who do not reside here?