“Even if I wasn’t invited, I wish to greet everyone Viva Pit Senyor,” he told the 5,000 or so in attendance who watched him endorse his party’s senatorial candidates for this year’s elections.
While the no-show of a President in the annual Sinulog isn’t a major loss, it wasn’t taken lightly by Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama and Sinulog Foundation officials, who took pains to explain that they did everything they could short of actually visiting the Palace to invite the President to attend the event.
The mayor, who was shunned by LP leadership in favor of his predecessor, Rep. Tomas Osmeña of Cebu City’s south district, was astute enough to know that not inviting the President to a major event like the Sinulog is ungracious and in poor form to say the least.
Rama already received enough hostility from Osmeña’s Bando Osmeña-Pundok Kauswagan allies and it won’t do the mayor good to snub the President even with the assurance of the presence of his new-found allies in Vice President Jejomar Binay and the rest of the United Nationalist Alliance (UNA) this Sunday.
In fact the President, his LP and the UNA have been at loggerheads over the past few weeks over the Capitol standoff which Aquino said didn’t exist because the services to the Cebuanos remain unaffected.
As far as official explanations go, President Aquino admitted that his office receives 50,000 invitations a month. Buried somewhere underneath that sizable pile is Rama’s invitation to the President to attend this year’s Sinulog, admittedly an election year.
Having been at the forefront of the event since he chaired the SFI for many years, Rama knows that booking the President for a mere 30 minutes to one hour for the Sinulog is done months in advance.
Whether Rama’s political rivals have something to do with this episode or not shouldn’t matter eventually. It’s not like the President would stay long and hobnob with him or his team who belong in the opposite side anyway.
Still, the President’s no-show shouldn’t alarm Cebu City residents who’ve seen enough of him during last year’s stopover at the National Thanksgiving Mass for Pedro Calungsod.
The President is a busy man and the public should understand enough that even with allies, he cannot please everyone all the time. There will be many more Sinulog events for him to attend and despite the political color, the event should be bigger than any one person.