A READER has reached out to relate an unfortunate incident at the Cebu City Transportation Office (CCTO) following a road crash at the South Road Properties viaduct last Aug 26.
The reader, aboard a scooter, crashed after his tire hit debris, likely a rock, on the otherwise well-paved road. The fall broke his clavicle. A city-owned ambulance, that took 90 minutes to come, brought him to a hospital. CCTO impounded the scooter.
He got the scooter back from impounding on Sept. 9, but not without issue.
The ignition keys were missing. The u-box that hid the vehicle’s original certificate of registration and official receipt was forced open, and the documents were now gone. The battery was replaced with a dead one. Even the battery cover was taken.
I have relayed all this, including the name of the reader, to Atty. Kent Jongoy, deputy chief and head of the CCTO’s legal division. He said he’ll look into it.
This, definitely, is not an isolated incident.
On Sept. 29, 2023, for example, journalist Iris Hazel Mascardo published a report that mirrored everything our reader experienced – motorcycle brought to the CCTO impounding with all bells and whistles still on; motorcycle later gets released from CCTO impounding with many parts now missing.
Atty. Jongoy, quoted in the 2023 report, also promised to conduct an investigation. I don’t know what came of it. But because the incident got repeated, I suspect not a whole lot.
But I sincerely hope that Atty. Jongoy and his staff can, this time, get to the bottom of the stink at the CCTO vehicle impounding.
Corruption, particularly the trillion-peso kickbacks supposedly made on deals involving flood control projects at the Department of Public Works and Highways, has been the main focus of network news for many weeks now.
What makes the story so gripping and so widely covered are the large sums reportedly embezzled and the well‑known figures accused of doing it. It’s ‘impact’ and ‘prominence’; two of the eight ‘news values’ that make a story ‘newsworthy.’
Incidents like our reader’s plight, or that which was reported by journalist Mascardo in 2023, aren’t so riveting. It’s too small-time for sustained media coverage and public attention.
But given the number of motorcycle owners based in or who travel to Cebu City daily, which tantamount to the number of people who will potentially have an encounter with CCTO Impounding in one way or another, this issue has relevance.
There is the compounded problem of otherwise good employees in CCTO falling vulnerable to the temptation of making a quick buck because some have yet to receive their salaries since July.
City Hall, according to a source, has only been able to pay some 40 CCTO employees for the first time last week. And CCTO has close to 500 employees in the payroll.
There are unwritten expectations and reciprocal obligations in employment relationships. The basic premise is that if it wants employees to work, the employer, the Cebu City Government in our example, must pay.
If the employers fail, and especially if there is no perceivable reason for the financially-capable employer to fail in its obligation, employee trust fades, their sense of commitment is reduced, their level of motivation diminishes, and buhay-buhay kicks in.
Buhay-buhay is a term I first heard from Assistant Ombudsman Virginia Palanca-Santiago when I was covering the anti-graft office decades back. It’s something a respondent would say in justifying an act of graft. I hear the term a lot in City Hall these days.
Buhay-buhay describes the living-day‑to‑day-and-paycheck‑to‑paycheck experience of limited or intermittent-incomed individuals. It’s a socio-economic pattern where individuals consume their current income to meet immediate needs and requires the next salary to survive.
It is characterized by a persistent financial pressure that, in turn, increases the vulnerability and lowers the threshold in some individuals to engage in small‑scale corrupt acts – be it petty bribery, informal fee‑taking, kickbacks, or cannibalizing an impounded motorcycle and then selling the parts – just to meet immediate needs.
When Mayor Nestor Archival was first confronted with the issue of City Hall workers not getting paid, he blamed it on the previous administration supposedly draining the budget, then he blamed it on the city treasurer getting sacked, and then he blamed it on the Department of Finance’s delayed appointment of a replacement.
What’s he going to blame this on next, rain?