Hostage-taking season

LETTERS FROM THE AGNO
March Fianza

Listening to all comments and reactions brought forth by the August 23 hostage-taking incident made me think that Police Sr. Insp. Rolando Mendoza is not alone in his problematic world.

Probably there are hundreds of others like him out there who feel that they have been treated unjustly by authorities. Like him, they too want their problems solved by any means – maybe by hostage-taking.

Consider the members of the GSIS and SSS who have yet to get their fair share out of their own money contributions which they should have received a long time ago.

There are also pre-need educational plan subscribers whose investments for their kids have already been spent many times over for other things by the owners of CAP and the other pre-need plan companies, including interests.

For the kids to be in college continuously, the parents have to double their efforts in looking for money for school fees, something that they did not want to do in the first place, hence, the pre-need educational plan.

And there are also the Pag-IBIG housing loan holders whose contributions are being filched by housing subdivision developers with the “thoughtful coordination” of people within the agency.

The difference between Mendoza and the other victims of injustice is that the former had the courage to do what he did.

Certainly, the Philippines as a “chaotic” country as described by a Hong Kong official would be proven to be true, if many of our kababayans who feel unfairly treated, perform a Mendoza act.

This simply means that there are similar “Mendoza incidents” just lurking round the corner. The hostage-taking incident should be a warning device for authorities that have the means to control imminent bad incidents in their agencies.

It is good to hear P-Noy say that his administration has to make revisions in the hostage-taking manual, but I would like to suggest that what needs to be revised is the way government goods are served. Government should exert more sincere effort in coming up with solutions to their clients’ problems.

By this time, the GSIS, SSS, Pag-IBIG, pre-need companies to mention a few agencies, should have come up with means on how to attend to thousands of complaints from clients.

While there is need to retire, replace or fire erring employees, doing so would not change the whole thing. The number of Mendozas would continue to increase since the system has not been revised or cleaned. Techno people call it “systems virus.” Indeed, we have a dirty system of governance.
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In last Monday’s city council session in Baguio, our “honorable” councilors were unable to squeeze out what they wanted to hear from the management and officers of the Benguet Electric Cooperative.

From the way the exchanges went on, I knew that many among the 14 of the councilors understood how the process in the purchase of the 1.2-hectare lot along South Drive was done.

Everything was legal, according to Beneco, as they answered most of the questions raised by the “doubting Thomases” in the council. Still, many of the councilors refused to understand.
What the councilors and the audience wanted to draw out from the question-and-answer in the session was if there was any overprice or tongpats in the purchase of the lot. There was that belief but it was eventually crashed.

Of course not every moment of the session was smooth-sailing for Beneco. There was a question that not one of them was able to answer because that can only be answered by a fortune-teller.

It looked like GM Gerry Verzosa and Beneco president Ferdy Bayasen were stunned with the question: “Can you tell us when will power rates go down?”

I was on track and followed the discussion but was stunned like the rest in the gallery because the question was just like asking “when will it rain.” And we know that like the coming of typhoons, electric rates are affected by so many unseen factors such as oil prices, dollar exchange rate, power generation cost, etc.

The Beneco-city council question-and-answer session was a “hostage-taking” drama, but that was the only hostage-taking incident that ended well because all would-be casualties from the Beneco “came out of the bus” alive. – marchfianza777@yahoo.com