SIGNS OF THE TIMES
WHAT forebode the signs now seem omnipresent in Cabanatuan City, some 117 kilometers north of Manila, in the Philippines?
What is clear of these signs is that a war is heating up between two main players in the Nueva Ecija patronage politics stage: Governor Aurelio Umali and Cabanatuan City Mayor Julius Cesar Vergara.
A quick glance at the signs war will lead the locals to thinking that it is one definitive issue upon which either one of the eager sides will win the main dispute over the planned elevation of the city to highly urbanized status. Both of them found a common theme for their debate via slogans on billboards and fliers. In the end, they obviously assume, whoever drives the point clearer to the people draws the fate of the central issue of HUC. In the farther unseen end, whoever prevails will prove their political clout in this place whose fate has long been consigned to political maneuverings.
The latest of these signs exchanges focus on the Cabanatuan quarrying issue. The provincial government banned the extraction of sand and gravel materials by the city government for the latter’s public works projects, including the rehabilitation of the roads hit by the recent typhoons. The city government erected billboards practically in all the conspicuous places in Cabanatuan denouncing the move. Sooner, billboards also mushroomed alongside the ones put up by the city government saying it’s not the provincial government’s fault.
These signs, written in Tagalog clichés, never went across the residents’ simple frame of mind. Instead, they confused them.
For one, the city government issued letters saying that it needed around 318,000 cubic meters of gravel to finish the pending projects. They claimed that the provincial government had reviewed and approved the extraction of the said volume from various sites.
A recently issued provincial government gratuitous permit allowed the city government to quarry 20,000 cubic meters within 60 days in Brgy. Macatbong. (Gratutitous permits means, free of charge). This also put another issue on the Macatbong quarry site – hardly elucidated by some pseudo-environmentalists – as chanced in some Youtube posts.
This signs war is also, the people are thinking, a good propaganda strategy for either of them for the next year’s local election.
The HUC fire-starter
In the late 2010, Vergara began setting Cabanatueños' mind for the plan to raise the city’s political rung to highly urbanized city. In 1998 local officials first attempted to change Cabanatuan City to HUC but failed in the ensuing plebiscite.
According to the Local Government Code of the Philippines, once a city has a population of 200,000 as certified by the National Statistics Office and an income of at least PHP50 million (based on 1991 constant prices) as certified by the city treasurer, the city government can request Malacañang for highly urbanized status within 30 days. Upon the President's declaration, a plebiscite will be held within a specific timeframe to ratify this conversion.
Vergara’s overtures alarmed the governor for two obvious reasons: once Cabanatuan becomes independent from the provincial government, the latter could no longer hold the former in many terms of political clouts; that the city voters will no longer elect for the governor. (Cabanatuan, which constitutes the majority of Nueva Ecija votes, told the winning governor in the past elections. The Josons never won in Cabanatuan, in fact, that they had difficulties in extending their far-flung rural areas turf. Cabanatuan voters made Umali win in his attempt in the local elections – first as a congressman then as governor. It is where his wife Czarina got his winning votes as 3rd District Representative and brother Anthony as board member).
If Cabanatuan will no longer vote for them in the future elections, they are not sure for a win.
Umali frantically exhausted his efforts to dissuade Cabanatueños on the HUC idea by distributing leaflets, airing his disagreements on the captiol-run dwNE and conducting pockets of information campaign in Cabanatuan. This equally alerted Vergara, on the other hand, and he personally went on air in his own radio station, dwJJ, in explaining why Cabanatuan should be converted to HUC. The residents has thus been fed with daily exchanges of unkind words against one another in the air. Vergara’s radio station has a teleradio component simultaneously heard and seen in the local television channel. This would not faze Umali as, using his connections being a former director of the National Telecommunications Commission, he put up a community television station, too. The trading of words would sometimes become personal and bitter.
And then came the billboards. Like mushrooms they started to sprout hither and thither. The uninitiated became confused, instead of informed. They were put in the middle of the Signs War arena never knowing what to do, where to go.
The two warring sides would never realize that their exchanges get them to nowhere now. They have polluted the air with their barter of unkind words. They have defaced with those eyesores of signs the emerging beauty of the growing urban community – including Vergara who tried hard enough in building his city.
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