LIKE the President-elect incoming Davao City Mayor Baste Z. Duterte is also currently placed in some kind of a “tight fixed.” That is, if he is to give in to pressures for him to accommodate his own trusted leaders and big-time supporters and give them department leadership positions at City Hall.
Baste is also well aware that the present department heads, mostly, if not all, are appointees of his elder sister now incoming Vice President of the Philippines. Baste may only have a very little elbow room to maneuver in order to give his top backers department head positions at the local government. One thing certain however, is that VP-elect Sara will take with her to Manila her City Administrator Atty. Zuleika Lopez. Personally we believe that she is one, if not the most trusted person of the outgoing city mayor; her woman Friday. We can already sense it when lawyer Lopez was personally picked by Sara as head of her transition team to discuss the processes for a smooth turn-over of the OVP from the current occupant to the newly elected.
It is also likely that the outgoing lady mayor will take along with her to Manila someone from her present department heads to act as her spokesman since her current mouthpiece Mayor Christina Garcia Frasco of Lilo-an in Cebu will be heading the Department of Tourism. She cannot do both at the same time. And there may be others who the forthcoming VP will tag along because of her confidence in their work. So, whoever he, she or they will be that VP Sara will pull out from City Hall the vacancies that will be created will be the ones that Baste can easily fill in with his own men or women. It is another story of course if the youthful new mayor will do an act that his father the outgoing President did when he was still mayor of the city. That is, “put in the freezer” some to him are less desirable occupants of certain department head positions.
Meanwhile, at the national level, incoming President Bongbong Marcos Jr. hasn’t divulged any new appointee to his incoming Cabinet in the whole of last week. Speculations are rife that the President-elect is struggling with himself in balancing his choices for the remaining Cabinet secretary positions still unfilled.
There is no doubt that Marcos Jr. has his own personal preferences but he too has to consider the concessions asked of him by the leaders of the many support groups who worked hard for his election. Any not properly thought of appointment he will make will definitely hurt some groups who backed his candidacy and perhaps helped foot some of the bills in his campaign.
Nonetheless, it is admitted that in the process of organizing a new administration not all can be pleased. And as experience will bare us out, as soon as certain groups or even individuals feel that they are being left out or their demanded concessions are not accommodated they become sudden critics of the evolving government.
**************************
From our own perspective the desire of the Marcos Jr. administration as embodied in the campaign pitch of his team which for unity, can never be achieved. Why, because even at this stage where Bongbong Marcos Jr. has already been proclaimed and his election has been acknowledged by leaders of several countries, his political rivals, more specifically defeated candidate Leni Robredo, still remain in the attack mode.
The group’s leaders and trolls, hiding in the comfort of their fictitious social media accounts, keep their bombardment on the legitimacy of Marcos Jr.’s election. They are even helping each other lift Robredo’s bench if only to prove that their candidate is the much better option for the Filipinos.
Imagine posting in social media the pictures of Leni ironing the clothes of her children; the VP and her family falling in line at the airport going to the check-in counter; the supposed relief distribution by the Vice President and her group to the residents affected by the eruption of Mt. Bulosan in Sorsogon with the caption”What is Marcos Jr. doing?”
Upon coming across with all those posts we were reminded of one line in a homily done by one Fr. Kim, an assistant parish priest at the Sacred Heart Parish in Calinan. He said, “Compassion without corresponding action is a waste of emotion.”
In VP Leni’s emergency response activities in Sorsogon, there definitely was compassion, then the action. But somehow, the value of the compassion that accompanies the action was badly eroded by the hidden but overt intention behind the move. The postings which without doubt have the approval of the outgoing Vice President, are intended to destroy the person she considers as personal enemy even as she clearly wants herself to be acknowledged as the only one who can do good for the people.
