I’m glad that Mayor Michael Rama gamely gave way to the suspension order handed down by Malacañang. If there is one thing that makes his electoral victory easier to attain, it is painting the image of an underdog, someone being punished for being in the opposition. For no matter how this suspension is read in legal terms, the common tawo, the ordinary citizen (that incidentally Mike now joins for the next 60 days), will see this as pure political harassment. And every social scientist worth his or her salt will see its tremendous impact come May 2016, assuming elections will be fair and no attempts will be made to tinker with those computerized voting machines.
If rumors are true that another round of suspension looms, this time including acting mayor Edgar Labella and councilors allied with him and the suspended mayor, then the Cebuano will not take that lightly. Once is affront enough; twice will just be too much to swallow. It will be seen as an assault on Cebu, no matter the legality of such a suspension.
I still do not understand at all why Malacañang imposed this penalty, barely a year after investigating it and at a time when politics is well in the air. It is most certain that Mayor Rama will use this affair as his badge of courage, standing up against a massive political machine out to defeat him in the polls. It can also be his best evidence of the continuing neglect that the national government has intentionally or not imposed upon Cebu ever since President Benigno Aquino III became president—a direct opposite of the heyday years when Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo poured everything on the city and province, starting on the very first day she took oath not in Manila but in Cebu.
Some people in Manila probably fail to understand the constant tension between a primate city (in our case the capital, Manila) and the second city (Cebu). This tension appears all over much of the modern world: Madrid versus Barcelona; Toronto vs. Ontario; Tokyo versus Kyoto; Sao Paolo versus Rio de Janeiro. The list goes on an on. Sometimes the tension is buried or toned down because the economies of both primate and second or queen city are either tied together or are at par with each other. At other times, then tension can erupt into calls for autonomy, like that between Toronto and Ontario (due to a substantial indigenous and linguistic differences) or Madrid and Barcelona (due to economic dependence of the capital from the second city).
Even Preident s. Cory Aquino, in the days leading to the EDSA Revolution of 1986, saw the role Cebu could play vis-à-vis Marcos’ Manila, by coming over to launch a massive civil disobedience campaign; Cebu being the alternative city.
Mayor Mike Rama has not raised this phenomenon yet, but pretty soon someone will not just see this suspension as a simple punishment but as part of a pattern of disdain by the national government over the development and progress of Cebu since 2010. The fact is unassailable: all these much-needed infrastructure (new airport terminal, additional airport runway, a third bridge, the Bus Rapid Transit, etc.) should have been started on Day 1 of P-Noy’s presidency. Instead, they will be inaugurated not by him but by the next president because they are starting to be bid out only now during the last 6 months of his presidency. Nothing can be sadder than this for a president who vowed to change things for the better.
Come now this suspension and the picture of Citizen Mike riding a jeepney. There is no doubt that a large percentage of the populace will pity him. Filipinos love to see these images of someone downtrodden, someone pitiful because he is up against someone powerful. The formula in Filipino movies is always—and Fernando Poe Jr. as well as Erap Estrada were good at this—to show a man so down and out, kicked all over and bruised for going against a powerful enemy but eventually able to rise from this dismal condition to fight the evils that befell him.
Malacañang has just done Citizen Mike a favor. The rest is now up to him and his public relations people to show how he rises up to face the “evil” that has come upon him and how he convinces all other Cebuanos that this ill-timed and badly scripted suspension is also an affront to Cebu. Will this work? We will know only after May 9 next year.
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