Why our unitary form of gov't is inutile

Allow me to doff my hat to my good friend former LTFRB Director Manuel Iway for taking the cudgels for the riding public and facing up to militant group Nagkahiusang Drivers sa Sugbo during a public hearing at the Regional Office of the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB). He demanded a P2 price rollback in jeepney fares and scrapping the P10 add-on fare on taxicabs. Those driver’s organizations can be technical about it, but the bottom line is the reality that in the past two weeks, the prices of gasoline and diesel fuel has gone down by as much as P10 per liter. Hence, there is no reason why fares should stay up! This is called being fair to one another!

The major problem really is, when the LTFRB Central Office in Manila approved those petitions like in the taxicabs, they didn’t realize that more than 90 percent of Cebu based taxis are already using Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG). They weren’t really hurt by the increase in the prices of gasoline and diesel fuel. There is no doubt that the taxi operators are merely taking advantage of the ignorance of LTFRB Manila about their operations here in Cebu.

It is really sad that we do not have a strong or credible consumer’s organization that could fight off these driver’s organizations and show up in great numbers during public hearings like what the LTFRB just had. Whenever oil prices go up, the jeepney riding public sympathize with these jeepney or taxi drivers. But when the prices of oil go down, we expect a tit-for-tat for these drivers to sympathize with the riding public that they have sworn to serve. But alas, greed gets in the way of public service.

That the Central Manila Office of the LTFRB still approves fare increase or decreases is one of the follies of our obsolete Unitary form of government. Issues like these can easily be taken on the Regional or State level (if we become Federal) but as it is, we all have to kowtow to Central Manila for such major issues that don’t affect Metro Manila. This is why we need to get rid of this Unitary form of governance as it has become inutile!

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The first week of October has been dubbed “Linggo ng Nakatatandang Pilipino” or the Elderly Filipino Week. This proclamation no.470 was issued during the time of then President Fidel V. Ramos, who I’m sure is now benefiting from his proclamation as he is already 80 years old. This year’s theme is “Nakatatanda: Huwaran at Yaman ng Bayan” which emphasizes the role of citizens as good models to the youth and the society as well as their contribution to nation building.

We Filipinos must be proud of our culture of taking care of our elderly. We know that in highly-developed economies, they have a system for taking care of their old family members by putting them in a home for the aged. But if there is anything that the elderly ought to pursue or advocate in this celebration for the Elderly Filipino, it is the full implementation of B.P.344 or the Accessibility Law. This law may have targeted the physically challenged, but just the same, it is a great help for the elderly, especially those who would rather walk up a ramp than climb the stairs.

Another advocacy that the elderly ought to fight for is accessibility within their own homes. We have so many architects these days who design nice houses, but are very unfriendly to the disabled. Those people living in the less than accessible homes are going to get old someday and when that day happens, the owners of the nice house may just have to find another place to live because they just can’t climb up and down those stairs anymore.

Surely you must have noticed that the celebration of Elderly Week is in the Filipino language, a language that many of us in Cebu are trying to resist because it is nothing but 99.9% Tagalog. Too many people, including Cebuanos, still believe in that misnomer called National Language. Tagalog nationalists say that having one language promotes unity in this nation.

Yet since the time of the conjugal Marcos dictatorship, with their slogan “Isang Bansa, Isang Diwa” it has never resulted in Filipino unity simple because forcing us to speak a language that we are not born in is not much different from what the Nazis did during World War II when they tried to create the Aryan Race. That act is called in modern times as Ethnic Cleansing. So when an ethnic group called Tagalogs force their language on us, it is also Ethnic Cleansing! A paradigm shift to Federalism would ensure that the languages (they are not dialects) of the Ilonggos, Cebuanos, Warays, Ilokanos, Tausugs and Bicolanos would never vanish.