The Rama marginalization must stop

Months ago, Atty. Josephus Jimenez, my neighbor in this page, wrote about what many in City Hall only whispered. He titled his article “The marginalization of Vice Mayor Michael Rama”. To me, it was the most telling description of the efforts of the men in the mayor’s office to blindside the vice mayor. I discerned that Jimenez didn’t want to stoke a kind of social distancing between our city’s top officials. Rather, he urged them to join their efforts in tackling all challenges facing the city especially that they ran in the last election as a team. There was no plausible reason to break the tandem early in their term as it was disadvantageous to ignore the contributions that Rama generated and provided the Labella administration. I couldn’t disagree!

My naïveté. I thought that the rumor of making Rama a non-factor in the city was only hatched in the minds of ambitious politicians. Jimenez opened my eyes on what’s really happening in City Hall. Since then, I tried to validate his keen observations. For one, I learned that in the earliest days of COVID-19, there were meetings among our officials where the vice mayor wasn’t involved. The reason usually offered by the mayor’s office in delisting the Rama from the functions was that the agenda in such gatherings were all administrative in nature. In other words, Rama had no concern.

One incident I came to know drove home the point. There allegedly was an offer made by Mr. Michael Gleisner to Mayor Edgardo Labella for the city to use the Big Foot structure to fight the spread of COVID-19. Rama reportedly learned of such gesture only when Labella rejected it. According to my source, if Rama was told of Gleisner’s letter, he would have recommended to Labella to accept it.

I surmise that at least two things preoccupied the mind of Rama upon hearing of Labella’s rejection of the offer. First, he really wanted to help Labella succeed in containing the virus and demonstrating his support more in action than in lip service. Second, he hoped to show the business sector the city is a friend.

The city is facing a faceless enemy but Labella, probably for reasons not of his own making, failed to finish the furnishing of two floors of the Cebu City Medical Center for COVID-19 patients on a certain date and missed the completion of a North Reclamation Area building to house patients. Thus, the urgency of acquiring a health facility surged. Labella needed support. With Labella hard-pressed to come up with some solution, Rama, always his supporter, re-explored the Gleisner offer and contacted his friends with high social concern and deep financial resources to work on the Big Foot structure to convert it to a COVID-19 facility. Rama and his friends succeeded in providing Labella’s administration with a Big Foot building re-designed to house pandemic patients at no expense to the city, as yet. It was inaugurated the other day in the presence of some benefactors like Beautiful Cebu Movement Foundation of Mariquita S. Yeung, Cebu Holdings, Gokongwei Brothers Foundation, SM Foundation, and Visayan Electric Co.

The body language and appreciative declaration from the Gleisner group at the inaugural showed that if it was insulted by the earlier rejection of its offer, the hurt felt by its corporate heart was subsequently assuaged. It’s safe to say the city leadership has demonstrated its friendliness to its investors. Rama saw to it that the message was conveyed.