Tell it to SunStar: Memo to governor

I’M WRITING to ask whether you’ve forgotten that you are a public servant. You were elected into public office to serve Cebuanos from all walks of life. You apparently forgot this when you engaged recently in a diatribe against a local citizen, Maricar Caballes. Your rant included ad hominem remarks about the lady, an infantile move on your part because it seems you went as far as to search for her Facebook account and make disparaging remarks about her looks. And you capped it off by saying that she had started the argument first. That is the reasoning of an eight-year-old, not a serious adult, especially not a government official accountable to the public.

The Commission on Human Rights has correctly chastised you on this affair. Caballes is within her rights to express her grievances, and she can rightly accuse the local government of corruption since she’s surely seen it all—how officials hand out cash before elections to buy votes, how special favors are given to those with connections to the powers that be, how local government officials flaunt their power and pelf, etc.

You chose to ignore Ms Caballes’s valid criticism about your administration. She asked if you haven’t considered that people are out of work and are going hungry. Your retort that you are the one being persecuted and don’t deserve to be called “bogo” (dumb), as she did, is totally wrong. Your administration is dumb, deaf and blind for not admitting what you see before you every single day, not just since the pandemic began but for years since your reign began.

I say “reign” because you carry on imperiously like you did in years past, before you were suspended by the Ombudsman. As mediaman Bobby Nalzaro pointed a year ago, during that time you revived TV channels that were purported to showcase Cebu’s attractions. Instead, he said most of the programs focused on your own personal activities. Nalzaro said that in your former Subgo magazine, one issue showed your photograph 67 times. He said in your radio block-time programs, your economic programs for the Province were hardly ever discussed; instead broadcasts consisted mainly of attacks on your political opponents and on members of media who did not kowtow (my word) to you.

One wonders if, like President Duterte’s officials did recently, you will go after and threaten those who call you out for not doing your duty towards your province-mates. A woman in Cebu and a young man in Zambales were practically terrorized after they went public and offered to pay anyone who would assassinate the President. Like Ms Caballes, they were venting their rage at the way the government keeps failing most of its citizens. If you threaten the same thing with Caballes, please remember that this is not a police state.

As you sit down to your evening meal each day (which I’m sure does not consist of cheap sardines and meatloaf) and then lull yourself to sleep in front of Netflix, try to think of your fellow Cebuanos who swelter in their miserable shelters with their empty rumbling stomachs.