What kind of leadership can the LP do for Cebu?

Yesterday, we had a taping schedule with the Cebu Aero Flying Club on my talkshow Straight from the Sky with Pres. Chris Darza, Andrew Co and former Rep. Alvin Sandoval at their hangar in the General Aviation. There’s no question that flying is in my blood and Chris made me fly his CTS over Bohol with Capt. Kqmar Bala… who flew me over a waterfall that no one has seen in Bohol. It was a fun day for me yesterday. Thanks guys!

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Finally after more than 40 days of being locked in or holed up inside the Governor’s Office at the Provincial Capitol, suspended Gov. Gwen F. Garcia was locked out of her office after she went on a sortie to the town of Oslob to meet with her leaders and followers. As expected, Acting Gov. Agnes Magpale took the initiative to prevent her return by padlocking the Governor’s office and the other facilities nearby.

So we ask… was it necessary for the acting Governor to padlock the office?  I don’t think so. What about those yellow police lines set up to cordon the area that we all saw on TV? Was that necessary too? Like it or not… they made the shutting down of the Governor’s Office look like a crime scene. This is the problem with the Philippine National Police (PNP) these days… they seem over eager to please the new masters at the Provincial Capitol that they ended up overdoing everything.

Come now… Gov. Gwen wasn’t born yesterday. Surely she must have had some kind of hunch that if she left for a long trip to the south, she might not be able to return to her office. But few people know that all this was already planned… just like the way her suspension was planned by her political opponents to happen just before Christmas. Yes, I’m referring to those politicians in the Liberal Party, who showed no heart in suspending the Governor, not even in the spirit of Christmas. Is this the kind of leadership that we can expect from the Liberal Party?

In my youth, I took pride in helping the Liberal Party here in Cebu because it was the party of the late Sen. Sergio “Serging” Osmeña, Jr. who ran against Pres. Ferdinand Marcos during the 1969 elections. Even our maternal home, which is now the JESA IT building beside the One Mango building, was used as LP headquarters for free. We mourned with the LP during the dastardly bombing of Plaza Miranda where LP leaders were nearly decimated.

When Martial Law was proclaimed, all the more we hated the Marcos Dictatorship, more so that freedom of speech was curtailed and LP Senators like the late Sen. Ninoy Aquino, Jr. was arrested. We were with Tita Cory and Doy Laurel in Fuente Osmeña during the EDSA Revolt, where we finally thought that our hopes and dreams would be fulfilled. We strongly believed and supported the return of Tomas Osmeña, the son of Serging who gave the slogan “Cebu City Second to None!” Gads! We took that slogan hook, line and sinker. We were had! Cebu today is second nowhere near Singapore!!

After 20 years in power, Rep. Tomas Osmeña kept power using his party, the Bando Osmeña-Pundok Kauswagan (BO-PK). Where was the LP then? It was held by former Senator John “Sonny” Osmeña. But the LP was a mere shadow of its old self… because instead of bringing back the 1935 constitution that the Marcos Dictatorship threw out, they created a new constitution hammered by people like Chief Justice Hilario Davide, Jr. or Fr. Joaquin Bernas who introduced that stupidity called a Partylist system and removed the more stable two-party system.

In the end, while the Liberal Party survived…it cannot even claim the majority in the Senate. Last Jan. 19, the Liberal Party celebrated their 67th year with a huge one-paid advertisement in the national dailies. But let’s ask anyone from the LP where they were during the Marcos Dictatorship? Indeed, the LP coalesced, rubbed elbows or kowtowed to the hated Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL) of the Marcos Dictatorship.

Today the LP is in power… and they were resurrected only in the 2010 elections… before the year 2010 the LP was a shadow political party. But then we live in interesting times. Once there were political monoliths called the KBL, the PDP Laban, the Partido ng Masang Pilipino (PMP) the Lakas-NUCD and now the LP. I assure you my dear readers that in three years the LP will go the way of the KBL and the rest.

On March 20, 2007, the Business Mirror came up with an editorial entitled “The death of the Philippine Political Party system” and asked the pertinent question, “Are political parties still relevant? Do they represent the “interest” of the people? What do Filipinos think of turncoats? The answer came from a study by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, the Center for Asia-Pacific Studies that confirmed the common observations that the majority of Filipinos think that political parties have nothing to do with their lives.

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