An Editorial of the Bohol ChronicleThe City Mayor leaves his office for 27 days, burdened by the horrors of self-inflicted controversies since October - each one getting worse than the last.
The last straw - that apparently broke the camel's back - was last week's apprehension of his fair-haired Barangay Captain Manolo Blanco - caught red-handed with damning evidence as alleged "biggest financier" of the illegal gambling game.
It is an accepted fact – nationwide - that swertres cannot thrive in any site without the protection of high officials and the police.
Hiding behind the alibi of giving the Opposition (behind the ascension of Vice Mayor Jose Veloso as Mayor) a chance to prove allegations of graft and ineptness, the 27 days of Veloso will not prove if the Mayor is guilty or not. That is for the courts and COA to say.
After months of keeping City Hall Accounting away from the public, all "documents are now sanitized and we don't expect to discover anything new", Velosos aptly stated.
Vice Mayor Veloso can display his own brand of statesmanship by accepting the "succession" imperatives but he would be well advised to implement only ministerial functions already approved by the Mayor-on-Leave, to shed any possible stain on his person he might draw from his association with a discredited Mayor Dan Lim administration even if momentarily.
The City's Top Honcho's desertion of his Mayoralty post, unprecedented in city politics, will not deduct from the fact that he is facing four criminal charges in Court which the City Mayor will not solve by broadcasting his defense on radio or appearing shell-shocked from the missile-charges and retreating in his foxhole for 27 days.
It would be good for the City Mayor to use his 27 days to cure his delusion that the "Silent Majority" of the city is still with him. The credible HNU Research Survey showed the Mayor's acceptability rating at 50%, as the Mayor himself claimed yesterday. Is that a clear "majority"?
Any statistician worth his graphs will say that the other half is not on his side or at least does not have a positive opinion about him. It's still a 50-50% acceptability battle he must be made to understand.
Even Vice Mayor Veloso has a 41% acceptability rating. If the HNU statistics like the SWS and Pulse Asia has a 3% plus-minus margin of error, both of them are not really that far apart. Watch while the issues against the Chief City Executive mount by the week.
In a radio survey in Radyo Merkado over Station DYRD, 93% of Boholanos condemned the Mayor's solicitous legal and financial help to a nabbed illegal game financier (who is also a barangay official in Mansasa district) while most frown on the presence of the two kagawads Oscar Glovasa and
Dandan Bantugan during the Mansasa raid by the Regional PNP.
It is true that politics is a perception game - but every day the City Mayor commits administrative and fiscal boo-boos and is daily weighed by people (we mean figuratively, of course) - and tested if found wanting. Unwittingly, he himself creates the own unflattering perception about his government.
"Let the people judge," is the Mayor's favorite dialogue. And so it has been.
There is also the forthcoming 2010 elections - and the people will likewise decide.
We understand that some civil society and anti-electoral fraud units will have their presence felt in Tagbilaran City and a few other towns in the province - color-coded as potential Waterloos for electoral uprightness. And hopefully, the automation should make cheating less easy to carry out. This would be good for the city.
The City Mayor often boasts that he is a warrior who can act confrontational. The truth is the deluge of damaging court cases and issues against him cannot make the City Mayor do otherwise. And we were not the least surprised by his announcement to "go on leave" at all.
With all the existing and forthcoming cases against him - the Mayor may have tried to preempt any "possible suspension" due to his numerous cases and issues by talking about it in his radio show. That, too, will have no bearing on the outcome of his cases, either.
The rainy season is upon us early and TBTK (every four years reunion of Boholanos worldwide) is just around the corner this July. Our visiting province-mates will soon hear for themselves what has been actually happening in the city while they earned their keep abroad.
Meantime, while they decide on what is "perception" versus "reality" in the City, we sincerely wish the departing Mayor better health and "good bonding" with his family, as he said in his farewell broadcast.
Nobody wishes a fellow human being ill, even if we trade the most vicious blows in mortal combat over issues.
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