PAGASA couldn’t have predicted it: a downpour of chairs on a sunny Thursday morning. The precipitation fell on policemen deployed at the Makati City Hall to ensure a peaceable serving of an order by the Ombudsman suspending the mayor on charges of corruption.
The enlistment of the police was necessitated by the difficult subject—a boy mayor with a penchant for defying even simple village rules.
In one spectacular incident, avoiding the great inconvenience of driving a hundred meters or so farther, he demanded that the Dasmariñas Village gates closed for the night for security purposes be opened for him and his convoy; when the security guard refused to bend the rule, the mayor got out with some of his bodyguards and abused him with language and gestures, all caught on camera, then took him away, and in the end got him fired.
The Ombudsman herself was not spared such defiance and arrogance. This was not the first time she ordered the mayor’s suspension. In a previous case, he also collected a mob of rabid supporters to protect him as he holed out in his office. Somehow he was favored with a restraining order by the appellate court, a ruling itself contested to this day.
The Ombudsman has got him now, but not before his supporters could express his sentiments—in so many chairs. The quality of their loyalty, though, will remain in question.
Prey to patronage
Sheltered in tents and supplied food and music and, as some reports allege, given some money, too, they would find the enlistment difficult to resist, I imagine. And, with the fates of 4,000 casuals on the city payroll and service contractors hanging in the balance, how could our boy mayor ever lack for support?
Of course, they’re in a way themselves victims of corruption, prey to patronage. The acting mayor, Kid Peña, has observed that many in the mob were not residents of Makati. But it’s hard to tell now where Makati’s borders end, with all the sister-city connections the Binay dynasty has built across the years.
Much of this arrogant sense of proprietorship of power has, in fact, to do with dynasty, and it all began with the patriarch.
In the Dasmariñas Village incident, the father—himself former mayor, now vice president and salivating for the presidency—believes his son, as mayor, deserved some courtesy, or some bending of the rules, in other words. How scary!
One thing about him is, he’s consistent where his son and the rest of his family are involved, such that, as regards the Ombudsman’s orders one and two, he counseled defiance.
In the second case he appeared stonefaced, spoke through gritted teeth, violently wagged a finger, and not only collared a police leader but threatened him, all this, again, captured on camera, but nevertheless egregiously denied.
Premature
In the end, at any rate, his son had to step down, although by then the loss to the dynasty in public goodwill may have become so great, little of it, if at all, could be meaningfully salvaged.
To be fair, the boy mayor had been prematurely thrust into a man’s job. The sight of him running tearfully into the cuddly arms of his father made me lose hope for a proper elder caring enough to straighten him out before he does himself and his family more harm.
For his part, the interior and local-government secretary Mar Roxas, appeared on television, looking assertive as never before, discoursing briefly but credibly about no one being above the law. That, I thought, was the time to take a poll. But it was, again, his luck that the media shifted their focus to Conchita Carpio-Morales, the Ombudsman.
“Nabubwisit na talaga ako, ha,” she warned, looking more feisty than triumphant, alluding to partisan accusations that she was dispensing selective justice—accusations made limp in fact by cases of corruption her office had just brought against some of the president’s own lieutenants and allies. As for the mayor’s decision to finally step down, she called it a “healthy development,” if a case of “too little, too late.”
I’m putting my money on this Ilocana—a 74-year-old former Supreme Court justice and wife and mother of two sons—to help set things right.
Indeed, she declares that, as Ombudsman, “I feel I have the moral fiber to prosecute those who ought to be prosecuted and to ward off any extra-legal factors which impede the prosecution of cases.”
I count on her to unspoil and de-brat anyone in public office who deserves it (in fact, she has already sent some of such characters to detention), to correct parental undoing.
“La primera escuela es la familia”—the first school is the family —says Pope Francis, putting squarely on parents the responsibility of moral discipline and value formation.
To deal with defaults that have produced overaged cases, Francis, no doubt, has a forceful disciple in Conchita Carpio-Morales.