A hefty afternoon topic

Before boarding a fast craft coming home to Cebu from Leyte last week, a gentleman approached me. I was also enjoying a cup of coffee at the terminal then. He disarmed me with his friendliness, sincerity and warmth more than his obvious intellectual depth. Quickly, he parlayed out conversation into an interesting topic, Cebu City politics, with his admission that his family was, many years ago, my ardent political supporter.Because indeed, I used to be a politician, I deemed it important to be more of a listener than a talker that afternoon. When it ended, it turned out to be an afternoon loaded with an idealistic approach of a hefty political topic.

The interest of this gentleman was not in being a candidate for any local position. His reply was a resounding negative when I queried if he wanted to run for any post. He said he was not carved for it, but for sure, he indicated an intense desire to help campaign for honest, capable and qualified candidates. In so many words, his emphasis was in the honesty and capacity of people to become leaders. By the way, I have his name but a commitment to make it confidential prevails upon me not to mention it here.

This gentleman was confident, to mean uninhibited, as distinguished from being timid, in his views. To him, we have but very few names to consider worthy of our trust. Most of our leaders have been in position for, in his own words, “time immemorial.” In his readings, these political families have lorded over our city, even before the second world war up to the present using actuarial methods instead of visionary thoughts. Amidst the abundance of principled men and women hereabout, it is a misfortune that none of the latter has surged forward to lead our people.

His discourse, figuratively, was mostly idealistic such that the idealist that I profess to be could yield to him my full attention. It is his theory that the time has come for new names to surface. Given that we have a little more than a year before the next polls, we have to search the horizon who among our learned professionals may be tapped to share their knowledge in controlling the reins of government.

That is his first problem. Finding a person who has enough credential and respectability to try to broach the idea of suggesting to some people to take a crack at city leadership is indeed a huge problem. This man must be of known civic consciousness and credibility so much so that when he talks about pushing someone to run for a government office, he engenders trust, not suspicion.

I share in his thought that if, not when, he meets that personality, the next problem is not as daunting. Why, what is the next problem? It is the search for candidates that is next to tackle.There are, to be sure, professionals, in our city who are acknowledged to be among the best of the crop. They are easy to look for. Top caliber lawyers, ace doctors, learned engineers, profound accountants, distinguished educators, and their like are residents in the city and practitioners of their craft. Unfortunately, most, if not all of them however, shirk even a brief discussion about political leadership. They have no time for that! Or they do not want to dirty their hands, so to speak, in a noble attempt to serve our country.

The biggest problem of my conversation partner seems to lie in the virulent practice in many of our voters. They may not constitute the majority but they are that numerous as to determine the winners. These electors look to an election as the day they convert to cash their solemn electoral duty. Our voters, if my newly found friend were to be believed, sell their votes and many of our politicians rise to power by cashing in on them.

The announcement that our ship has arrived ended a consuming talk.In our parting, my friend mentioned these problems more in the hope that by any providential circumstance, some souls respond to what he calls as the dire need of our times.