I had mixed emotions upon reading the news report that the Cebu City Sangguniang Panlungsod passed a resolution allowing the admission to the College of Nursing in the Cebu City Medical Center of students who are not residents of Cebu City. That action by the city council was a unified and wholehearted support of the recommendation earlier filed by one of its members, the Hon. Roberto Cabarrubias.
To recall, the sangguniang member from the south district was justifiably alarmed by the dwindling number of students enrolled in the city's nursing school. He was apprehensive that the small college population would correspondingly yield low revenue. Such situation would force the city to use additional funds just to maintain the school, funds which could otherwise be devoted to the delivery of other basic services.
Not long after Hon. Cabarrubias made that recommendation, the honorable South district congressman Tomas R. Osmeña, put the councilor to task. It was the position of the lawmaker that city funds should be appropriated solely for the benefit of the city's taxpayers. In a way, he opined that enrolling non-city residents in the city's nursing school would be equivalent to spending city taxes for the benefit of non-city residents to the deprivation of the city residents.
Here is what I felt first. Candidly, I perceived that the councilor was wrong in his recommendation. It seemed to me that his thought process was skewed. Was he trying to play politics in proposing to allow the admission to the city owned nursing college students, who, or whose parents had not contributed to the funds of the city? The generation of such students could probably mean additional votes for him this election even if the consequence of such move could be an added, though avoidable, financial burden to the city.
Necessarily, my second feeling on this issue favored the position of the south district legislator. His logic was irrefutable. The city has, indeed, the duty to push for the welfare of its own people as it is not obligated to answer the needs of non-city residents. I could not help but congratulate him in postulating a sound policy direction although it contradicted a previous pronouncement.
Actually, the former mayor, in contradicting the recommendation of the councilor, somersaulted in a policy. Was it not he who “gave†away a pork barrel fund allocated for the south district to the Cebu province? If the lawmaker were only consistent, he should not have deprived the south district of the kind of money he somehow “authorized†to be transferred to the benefit of the people living in the first district of the province. When he did that, I thought he was both taunting the sitting mayor and trying to ingratiate himself to the political base of the congressman of the first district of Cebu. Using an obnoxious play of words, he tried to cover the fact his “giving away†his pork worked to the tremendous detriment of the city.
Well, when the BOPK-dominated city council propped up the recommendation of Hon. Cabarrubias, it signaled an appreciably new stance. The sanggunian members knew the position of the congressman, their political kingpin, on this issue. They must have understood the vigorous opposition of their political master to the Cabarrubias formula. By opting to approve the recommendation of their co-councilor, the SP members began to show to Cebuanos that they could also say no to their benefactor.
In other words, the dominant BOPK members of the city council, by not heeding the words of their master, said, in a manner or speaking, that the honorable congressman Osmeña was wrong in his policy direction. What a stinging rebuke! Their message, which, to me, is unprecedented, makes mine mixed emotions. There never was a time in the past that they belittled the position of the representative. Are they telling us that gone were the days when they would take hook, line and sinker, the pronouncements of their godfather? If so, what has emboldened them as to demonstrate the crack in the political hold of their king?
As they usually say it in Tagalog, Abangan ang susunod na kabanata!
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