He wished he could walk and talk with the president every day so he could take up the region’s concerns personally and more frequently, Mike Dino told us in 2016. The “walk and talk” was a play of words; he had just inducted the officers of the Walk and Talk Friendship Club.
He did not get his wish to be by former President Rodrigo Duterte’s side on a daily basis but he had his ears when he needed them for six years and it showed in the many things that he brought to the Visayas. Dino approached his duties as Presidential Assistant for the Visayas in a manner that was anything but playful and Duterte rewarded his efforts by promoting him to the rank of Cabinet secretary.
Dino elevated the Office of the Presidential Assistant for the Visayas (Opav) from the level of an appendage, one of the many created for political accommodation, to a functioning agency to whom local government officials and ordinary citizens alike brought their concerns, hoping they would receive attention. Many times, they did.
When there was a landslide, the Opav was there. When a typhoon struck, the Opav was one of the first offices to respond. No cause was below Dino’s attention. In the second of my only two visits to his office, I found him talking to a distraught husband pleading for a pardon for his convicted wife.
But it was during the Covid-19 pandemic that the otherwise low-key Opav secretary found himself in the limelight—and on the crosshairs of his critics. It is not exaggerating to say that Dino orchestrated the national government’s initial response to the pandemic in the region, especially in Cebu City.
It was a chaotic period because nobody, not even the scientists and medical experts, knew what Covid-19 was, how to stem its transmission and how to treat the afflicted. What everybody appeared to agree on, amid the panic, was the need to identify those who were infected by the coronavirus so they could be isolated. But the question was, how?
The RT-PCR test, that was supposed to be the “gold standard” in the field, was not yet locally available so city and health officials went for the more accessible and cheaper antibody test for the purpose of screening those who have been exposed to the virus so they could be brought to the isolation centers. Many geniuses however claimed that the antibody testing was a fraud intended for money-making and targeted the Opav secretary and then Cebu City mayor Edgar Labella for abuse.
Compared to Labella, who was a politician and had gotten used to virulent attacks, Dino was a private person, whom Duterte drafted into government service so while Labella took everything in stride, Dino bristled especially since his family, through the foundation created in honor of his late mother, had donated a huge quantity of the test kits.
Finally reaching his boiling point, Dino responded to his detractors by calling them “bugo,” but it only added to the frenzy as the critics engaged in more skullduggery, making it appear that Dino had called all Cebuanos, instead of just them, dumb.
Looking back now, one can just imagine how much worse the initial burst of the pandemic could have hurt us and how many more lives would have been lost had Dino and Labella surrendered to their attackers. We owe both.
Dino stepped down on June 30, 2022, the same day Duterte left Malacañang. Whoever succeeds him has big shoes to fill.