Days of reckoning

For the sober observer, the upheavals set off at Cebu City Hall by Mayor Michael Rama’s departure from the Bando Osmeña Pundok Kauswagan can turn out to be an opportunity or a disaster for the players involved.

Rama’s falling out with BO-PK patriarch and Rep. Tomas Osmeña of Cebu City’s South District  that stemmed from differences over the clearing of Mahiga Creek shouldn’t in the least affect the delivery of services to the public especially through the city’s 80 barangay captains.

That is a grim possibility in the face of Rama’s intent to revamp his roster of department heads and the City Council’s game plan to meticulously fiscalize Rama’s platform of governance for the remainder of his maiden mayoral term.

The former could turn ugly if the mayor fails to demonstrate satisfactory criteria for firing and hiring City Hall officials and day to day city government is hampered with casual employees seeing their retrenchment as no more than the consequence of a political confrontasi.

The latter could degenerate into pure filibustering by councilors as they conveniently don the cloak of accountability advocates while in effect making the  masses suffer some more as their needs are subordinated to official megalomania.

We wouldn’t come up with this prognosis had the conduct of politics in City Hall been a notch more diplomatic.

But Vice Mayor Joy Augustus Young officially signalled the end of the honeymoon when he characterized the upcoming designation of Councilor Margot Osmeña at the helm of the council’s budget committee as part of the preparation for a war that BO-PK members feel the mayor provoked.

If there must be war, both Rama and the BO-PK members in the city government need to prepare themselves not so much against each other’s power maneuvers as against the days of reckoning of the party—for years Rama’s own—that appear imminent.

Issues have surfaced for which Rama and his new political adversaries in the BO-PK need to make an explanation: “ghost beneficiaries” to whom the city lost hundreds of thousands in cash gifts for senior citizens, caterers selected without the requisite bidding to feed to poll workers in May and October last year, medical assistance issued to beneficiaries in the absence of prescriptions or beneficiaries who are covered by private insurance, even faces of BO-PK politicians appearing on city vehicles in continuing defiance of a presidential directive against faces on public property.

Will Rama and the BO-PK spill the goods on one another?

If they will, that would be a war for transparency to watch.