Politicking in governance

Presidential Assistant for the Visayas Michael Dino is closer to President Rodrigo Duterte than Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña is to the President. Consider that at a time when Dino was fresh in his post last year, Osmeña was struggling to connect with the President and was even stripped by the National Police Commission of his supervision of the police.

Dino, therefore, has the bigger responsibility of ensuring that the information from the Visayas, particularly from Cebu, that flows to the President and Malacañang would be unadulterated and objective. Failure to do so would be detrimental in the sense that the view of, say, Cebu from the top would be muddled.

Thus, when Dino announced recently that he would lobby with the President and other government agencies to cancel the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project in Cebu City, the hope is that the announced move is well-studied. The BRT is among the major projects for the city and its implementation or non-implementation would impact considerably on the Cebuanos, especially because this concerns improvement of the traffic situation here.

The need to be objective is even more important because the BRT project has gone to the implementation phase, with funding already approved. This would mean that all the concerns, apparently including those raised by Dino recently, have been addressed, the reason the project is now being implemented. It would be tragic if the BRT project is scuttled for reasons other than its viability.

Having said that, Osmeña himself must also look at himself in the mirror. He himself has blocked projects for subjective and political even personal reasons. His conflict with Dino started when he blocked a multimillion-peso development project in Talamban that would have been initiated by a Dino-led firm. It was not mere coincidence that Dino’s partner in the project was the Cebu Provincial Government under then governor Gwendolyn Garcia, Osmeña’s “enemy.”

That is the problem when partisan politics and personal biases seep into governance, which happen often. And since we consider this a problem, we should not therefore allow it to also affect the BRT project implementation.