Time to hire or fire our barangay leaders

Our special presentation on our talkshow Straight from the Sky tonight is a discussion on preserving the Cebuano tongue with the group behind the Akademiyang Bisaya with Mayor Adelino Sitoy as president. The coming launching of the Multi-Lingual-Education (MLE) means that Cebuano will finally be taught in the early formation years of our grade school children. For many centuries under Spanish rule, Cebuano was never officially taught in schools. We just passed it on through the years.

Under American rule, English was the official language, which helped Filipinos communicate with one another because Cebuanos then could not understand (many of us still cannot speak it properly) Tagalog, Ilokano or Bicolano. This is why English was widely embraced by Filipinos, as it is a leveling language where a poor man who can speak English can be understood by an educated man.

But when the Americans gave us independence in July 4, 1948, by some sleight of hand, Tagalog was made into the National Language, which meant that the 170 languages in this archipelago faced extinction. It is now happening in places like Tarlac, where their native language is giving way to Tagalog. This is also happening in Pampanga, which is a totally different language from Tagalog. But at least we Cebuanos resented and refused to embrace the national language because it is still supposed to evolve.

But under then Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, she introduced MLE because studies have shown that grade school kids learn better and faster using their native tongues as medium of instruction. Many people are against this because they wanted English as medium of instruction in schools. But these people come from urban areas and do not know what’s happening in the far-flung areas. I support MLE because, for the first time, our children shall learn Cebuano the right way.

Our guests, Atty. Manuel Lino Faelnar, Greg Jumao-as Exec. Director of the Akademiyang Bisaya and Prof. Jess Tirol have kept tabs on the proper way of teaching Cebuano. The Akademiyang Bisaya has the sole responsibility to record all Cebuano words for our schools to use. So watch this very interesting show on SkyCable’s channel 15 at 8:00pm tonight.

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Today, for the second time this year, Filipinos will go out and vote for their Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) officials. We can only wish all the contenders good luck and hope that the corrupt and the lazy barangay officials won’t win their re-election bids. There are many barangay officials who have been infected by our overstaying politicians, thinking and believing just like their political bosses that their official positions are a family heirloom to be passed only to family members.

So if you think that your barangay captain or councilmen have not been helping you then today is the day you can exact your vengeance against the corrupt and incompetent and act like the boss that you really are and fire these good-for-nothing officials!

I have made my position very clear on the Barangay system. It needs real and genuine reform. I would even agree that we end this election nonsense. It has only made barangay officials spend during the campaign where many of them follow the mainstream politics in spending more money than they can ever hope to recover by the miniscule salaries of a barangay official. This means, they would have to resort to corruption.

One such reform for the Barangay is to have them appointed by the elected government officials, Non-Government Organizations (NGO) and perhaps Catholic Lay organizations as well in order to strike a proper balance between the government and civil society. We can do this by creating an ad hoc group that would “hire” barangay captains based on their competence or developmental capabilities and not on political patronage. With this scheme, we can now fire our barangay leaders if they don’t perform and we don’t even have to wait for elections.

If we have the political will to do this, there would be a great many savings for our government, monies that can be used to increase the salaries of the “hired” barangay leaders. But then again, these reforms can only happen if the people demand this from our members of the House of Representatives. Many Filipinos pin their hopes on Pres. Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino, III, but alas, the change that he was supposed to establish as he promised during the election campaign isn’t materializing.