Stumbling along

Lowdown

By JoJo A. Robles

Two years ago this week, a dismissed Manila policeman took over a bus filled with Chinese tourists, triggering a series of unfortunate events that culminated in the death of nine persons, including the hostage-taking former lawman, at Manila’s Rizal Park. The incident was the first of the many crises that have since rocked the administration of President Noynoy Aquino, who quickly earned a reputation of disappearing during critical situations.

Two years and many more man-made and natural crises later, the narrative of the hands-off slacker President remains achingly, distressingly familiar. Last week, as if following the same noynoying script, Aquino sent his local government secretary to Cebu to deliver a speech the President had committed to deliver, which directly led to the death of Jesse Robredo and two other persons in a plane crash off Masbate.

The bloody Rizal Park hostage fiasco and the death of Robredo serve as bookends to an administration that came into power with so much promise but which has generally and grossly under-delivered in key areas, not the least of which is coming up with a coherent and comprehensive response to emergency situations. The student government, two years into its term, has not proved itself to be a quick study.

And in the center of it all is Aquino himself, the unapologetically polarizing head of a country divided into his partisans and everyone else, the latter being gleefully relegated by those in power to second-class, persecution-prone citizens in their own land. Two years on, Aquino still plays to his base almost exclusively, as biased and non-inclusive as the yellow symbol that permanently adorns his chest.

As Aquino and his government attempt to stumble through the nearly four more years left in its contract, nobody knows how many more crisis situations will hit the country. The only things that seem certain are the incompetence of the administration and the rabid partisanship of its oft-disappearing head.

There could be a lesson here for Aquino and his gang of slow-learning amateurs. But perhaps they will have to remove their partisan blinders— and get Aquino to be less diffident and lackadaisical—to learn it.

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Speaking of disappearances, Robert Blair Carabuena, the motorist who manhandled a Metro Manila Development Authority traffic enforcer, resurfaced yesterday at the agency’s headquarters in Makati yesterday to publicly apologize for losing it last week. Carabuena, a later report said, was taken to a hospital after he was heckled and harassed at the Quezon City prosecutor’s office, where he attended a preliminary hearing on the assault charge filed against him by his victim, Saturnino Fabros, and the MMDA.

Now that a contrite and chastened Carabuena has decided to show himself and man up to the consequences of his boneheaded, testosterone-fueled action, perhaps everyone should allow the justice system to decide what his fate will be. No matter what Carabuena says or offers, Fabros and his agency should resist the temptation to settle this matter out of court, not only because of how the mauling has inflamed the public but also because motorists should learn that they cannot get away with disrespecting the law or its enforcers.

It is noteworthy that Carabuena did not resort to filing a countersuit against Fabros, as many had expected, since people close to him had already been laying the groundwork for a strategy that had Fabros instigating the whole sordid incident by thumping on the Philip Morris executive’s Volvo when it attempted to run a red light. Carabuena’s public apology is a good move, but it is just the start of the long (and, if I may add, richly-deserved) ordeal that he will have to face on his way to redemption in the eyes of the public.

As for MMDA, its executives and enforcers, l’affaire Carabuena should not cause too much celebration that they don’t learn from the experience, as well. I’ve always maintained that MMDA’s executives and employees could use a lot more knowledge of the law, integrity and humility to go with their official status as agents of order.

Take this deputy of MMDA Chairman Francis Tolentino, a former University of the Philippines assistant professor named Alex Cabanilla. Cabanilla, I’m told, exemplifies the arrogance that infects people who are suddenly thrust into high office through his gratuitous need to embarrass his co-workers for no apparent reason.

Last Monday, Cabanilla showed how more like Carabuena he is than Fabros when he humiliated an MMDA director in front of the media and officials and employees of the agency during a post-flooding cleanup drive. MMDA director Sandra de Jesus, whom Cabanilla called out for being, of all things, short of stature, broke into tears after the uncalled-for attack on her person.

In another recent public display of his weird sense of humor, Cabanilla announced that the MMDA’s general manager, Corazon Jimenez, another woman, was a graduate of AIM, “not the Asian Institute of Management, but Ayaw Iwanan ang Mike.” It is not known if Cabanilla also drives a Volvo.

Tolentino should tell this suddenly-powerful former professor to shape up or grow a goatee like Carabuena, so he can be easily identified as a jerk. Cabanilla is a disgrace to the humble public servants like Fabros whom he lords over.