EDITORIAL - And now the lip service begins

As founder and leader of the BOPK, Tomas Osmeña may be forgiven for going to great lengths to extol the supposed "virtues" of his slate in the 2016 elections. Osmeña was reported in the papers as saying Cebu City needs technicians, not lawyers, to fix the city's problems. He was apparently trying to draw parallels between his BOPK and that of rival Team Rama of incumbent Mayor Michael Rama.

But as a former mayor himself, and as a former congressman, Osmeña knows fully well that that is not exactly an honest assessment of the functions of the city council that his slate is aspiring for. The city council is a legislative body. Its main function is legislation. It is the executive department that is in charge of fixing the day-to-day problems of running a local government.

While there is no law specifying the calling of a person who may aspire for a seat in the city council, common sense dictates that legislative functions and expectations are best served by a person steeped in the law rather than one who is not. In the event a council gets stumped by technical aspects of legislation, it can always refer to the expertise of its various consultants and staff.

Besides, it is also an integral function of the legislature to conduct public hearings in order to be appraised of public sentiment regarding any measure it may seek to enact, as well as to consult experts -- technicians among them -- on the subject at hand. In crafting laws, it is a no-brainer which between a lawyer and a technician is best suited for legislation, in the same manner that it is an engineer you need at the engineering department and not a lawyer.

But then Osmeña may be right in one respect -- the one he said clearly without actually saying -- that it has now become perfectly all right to put anyone in the city council because, as has become the practice, not just in the city council but in all legislative bodies everywhere, notably including the Philippine Congress of which he was once a member, actual legislation now plays only a minor part in "legislative functions."

The new main functions of "legislation" are 1) the distribution of political largesse and 2) the protection of one's political interests. From the Congress of the Philippines to the different city and municipal councils all over the land, public service is now almost exclusively defined as the distribution of projects. Nothing almost ever dribbles from the lips of legislative candidates except promises of political largesse. As a result, no law of significance gets passed anymore.

As to the protection of one's political interests, one need not look far for examples. Those who have kept track of the political intramurals at the Cebu City council know exactly what is going on. And what is going on needs no legal or, as Osmeña would have it, "technical" qualification. All that is needed is canine loyalty to a political party and the city council can swing from one side to another without really going anywhere. In the end, it is the Cebuanos who get stuck and suffer.