Togonon: Pasay City’s change for the better

FORMER

Manila City Chief Prosecutor Edward Togonon offers a threeway political showdown in Pasay City, a development that thrills political pundits of the city. It seems people of Pasay want change.

With assets at P16 B, Pasay City is the country’s 8th richest LGU. It hosts the Mall of Asia, scores of hotels, restaurants, and casinos. Yet people live in squalor along trash-filled esteros.

Most streets are dark, dangerous, and dirty. The multi-story Pasay City General Hospital has only one small, tight elevator which could not fit a stretcher. Worse, patients have to bring their own bedsheets. The City University of Pasay is not even accredited with the Commission on Higher Education (CHED).

The Commission on Audit (COA) reports on Pasay City for the last 10 years reveal a trail of “red flags” that could explain the sorry state of Pasay. The COA reports are worthy of another report.

Togonon was a young lawyer when he joined the Pasay City Fiscal’s Office in 1986. In six years, he would be promoted three times, earning at least three “Outstanding Prosecutor” awards in the 1990s.

Togonon was named chief prosecutor of Muntinlupa in 2000, and chief prosecutor of Manila in 2013.

Peers acknowledged his leadership by electing (and re-electing) him president of the Prosecutors League of the Philippines in 2006 and 2008. They also elected him president of the Chief Prosecutors Association, Inc., in 2012.

They also dubbed him “Champion of the Rights of Prosecutors” for pushing the The National Prosecution Service Law, RA 10071, a landmark legislation strengthening the National Prosecution System by rationalizing the ranking, salaries, and retirement of the country’s prosecutors, among other provisions.

Togonon could have just retired, traveled the world with his wife Glenda. But public service beckoned. He’s back in his beloved Pasay City, the place where he lived as a student and later served as a young fiscal.

He is up against an adminbacked well-funded sibling of the incumbent mayor. Is Togonon the “change” Pasayenos have been hoping for? We will know that on May, 13, 2019.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!