Distasteful

The initial line of Rolando Carbonell’s “Beyond Forgetting” has, since I read it first in the late 60s, always fascinated me. “For a moment, I thought I could forget you. For a moment, I thought I could still the restlessness of my heart. I thought the past could no longer haunt me nor hurt me.”

Really, when someone showed me the Facebook posting of outgoing Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña (and this obviously was the source of a subsequent news story of a local daily), I thought that the mayor accepted his devastating loss in the last election.

Believe me, the language of his posting was devoid of the arrogance that I have perceived his character to be. There was no attempt on his part to explain or even rationalize why the margin of victory enjoyed by incoming Mayor Edgardo Labella was so huge that it could be taken to show the scorn many Cebuanos hold against his rule.

To me, it was an Osmeña humbled by an unthinkable repudiation by the people he previously imagined as his vassals. He did not concede to his victorious political foe in unmistakable phraseology but the totality of his posting left no doubt that he accepted defeat. Yes, for a moment I thought the electoral past would no longer haunt him nor hurt him.

Still, when I chanced attending the session of the Sanggunian Panlungsod the other Tuesday, May 21, the next line of Beyond Forgetting came ominously clear. “How wrong I was.” My earlier impression that the defeated mayor would turn over the city administration to his triumphant opponent in undisguised humility was wrong.

I must admit that I grossly erred. He, Mayor Osmeña, would not yield the arrogant perks of power. The City Council, through the sponsorship of Atty. Sisinio Andales, a dear kompadre of mine, sponsored a resolution that would effect the donation of many city-owned motor vehicles to many barangays of the city, the captains of which political allies of the BOPK.

Let me go back to the 2016 elections when Mayor Osmeña bested Atty. Michael Rama for the mayorship of our city. I recall that even before he officially assumed office, his lady, the highest administrative authority of the city following the mass suspension officials, issued a directive for all barangays to surrender the possession of city-owned vehicles to the city.

The protestations of village chiefs that they needed the motorized units in the discharge of public service fell on deaf ears. In my mind, a new policy had been laid out, no matter how prematurely, and that policy was to make the city in physical control of its moving assets. And that policy lasted until the mayor felt the bitter pang of electoral defeat that moved him to show he still had weapon of oppression to wield against his successor.

There is a parallelism in the case of Aytona versus Castillo and what the majority members of the City Council and Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña did. That case talked of midnight appointments. An outgoing president tried to deprive his successor the privilege of filing up government positions with men and women of his trust and confidence. In the last few days before he would leave Malacañang, he appointed hordes of his supporters to vacant posts. The outgoing president got the rebuke of the Supreme Court.

What Mayor Osmeña and his minions in the City Council did on May 21 was no less odorous. Donating vehicles was not an act of liberality to the recipient barangays. They intended to show power in the face of the electorates who decided that the Osmeña administration be changed and along with its arrogant use of power. In the midnight of his last few days of rule, Osmeña wanted to emasculate the incoming administration. How distasteful.