Even media plays along with it: identifying barangay chairman so-and-so and SK chairman so-and-so as belonging to the BOPK or to Team Barug–PDP.
Never mind if this is a violation of the election code. Even the flyers I received from Banilad were not only colored in the hues of the dominant and opposition parties of Cebu City, they carried the name of these political parties! There can be no graver violation of the election code than this. And yet no one is protesting.
What gives? Why have we come to this point where even media, the Fourth Estate, is unquestioning in its treatment of what was designed to be a non-partisan electoral exercise?
The barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections, first introduced during the Martial Law years of Ferdinand Marcos, were supposed to be a simple act of voting leaders to serve at the village level. Marcos of course had other plans. And present-day politicians appear to have taken his cue.
The main culprit is of course the seat offered to the heads of the Association of Barangay Chairs and Association of SK Chairs in the provincial, city and municipal councils.
From a mere community-level exercise, these coveted seats have made such elections highly politicized simply because, as shown by Cebu City alone, they can add or reduce the majority or minority votes in the council. Like Marcos before, we have made these elections as instruments to polarize our small communities and villages when they should in fact unite everyone.
You want to depoliticize these hitherto humble, small-time positions? Remove their seats and their voting power in the municipal, city and provincial councils. And let them work on serving their constituents the way they should and not worry about this or that mayor.
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Attention, Mayor Luigi Quisumbing, the traffic barriers your people set up at A.S. Fortuna near the intersection with Hernan Cortes have furtively been cut somewhere in the middle to allow oncoming traffic from the opposite direction to turn left to McDonald’s, thus effectively slowing traffic right near the intersection on a part of the street that has double yellow lines. I guess your traffic managers do not know what a double yellow line means. In my book, double yellow lines strictly indicate no passing, with no exceptions. Or is McDonald’s an exception?
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