A catch-22 situation for Treñas

By Herbert Vego

 

“DAMN if I do, damn if I don’t.”

We did not hear Iloilo City Mayor Jerry Treñas quote the famous quotation, but that was the catch-22 position he found himself in. In other words, he stays enmeshed in a dilemma from conflicting opinions.

For more than a month already since May 23, the Inter-agency Task Force (IATF) has placed the city under modified enhanced community quarantine (MECQ). In fact, the mayor himself asked for it in reaction to a surge of Covid-19 cases.

Toward the end of June, however, Treñas asked for reversion to a more permissive general community quarantine (GCQ) while following safety protocols to appease the business sector that had been blaming lockdowns for the city’s declining economy.

The IATF rejected the request by re-extending the city’s MECQ status until July 15, 2021.

The mayor is thus torn between constituents who prefer GCQ to MECQ and those of opposite persuasion.

And while he is also torn between pro-vaccine and anti-covid vaccine constituents, he has minced no words in asking all to get jabbed despite the insufficiency of vaccine supply.

We thought all was well that would end well yesterday when presidential spokesman Harry Roque and several officials from the Department of Health (DOH) planed in with 50,000 doses of China-made Sinovac vaccines.

He could not hide his disdain in his speech at Freedom Grandstand. Why Sinovac for Iloilo when other cities were getting the preferable US-made Moderna and Pfizer vaccines?

“Ano kami iya diri, amô?” he asked.

Oh well, that reminds us of monkeys. They indeed fill the roles of guinea pigs in experimental vaccination.

Don’t you agree, Cong. Jam-Jam?

—0—

‘NO DISCONNECTION’ DOES NOT MEAN ‘NO PAY’

WHEN the management of MORE Electric and Power Corp. (MORE Power) declared “no disconnection” while Iloilo City is under the Modified Enhanced Community Quarantine (MECQ), it was to allow a period for relief and additional time for hard-up customers to settle their bills.

Disconnection would only resume once the MECQ is lifted. However, meter reading and bill delivery would go on as usual.

Suspension of disconnection, however, was never meant to suspend bill payment via payment centers.  Obviously, it’s because accumulated bills would be harder to pay.

On the part of MORE Power, it would be impossible to condone delayed payments without losing. As mere distribution utility, it is obliged to pay consumed electricity to power generators like Panay Power Corp., Panay Energy Development Corp. and Aboitiz Renewables.

If our informant was telling us right, while power pilferage has diminished among ordinary households, it has soared among barangay facilities such as barangay halls and health centers.

Well, to put it in a kinder way, they must have forgotten to pay. But rather than listen to rumors, why not take it from a reliable source of information?

We expect to get it from MORE Power’s President Roel Z. Castro. Listen. He is scheduled to shed light on the matter on Sunday (July 4) at 12:45 p.m. on the radio program “Tribuna sang Banwa” on Aksyon Radyo.

Don’t you agree, Kap Irene Ong?

—0—

A BOOK ON A SACADA-TURNED-OFW

IS it possible for a lowly sacada in a Negros Occidental sugar plantation to soar high as an overseas foreign worker in the Middle East?

The answer to that question summarizes the inspirational survival story of my friend from Bacolod City — Eduardo Gulmatico, 68 — as revealed in his book of memoirs, Tears and Joys.

As organizer of a labor union in a sugar mill, he fought for higher wages in 1982 but this provoked his employer into filing civil and criminal cases against him.

After his wife gave birth to their fourth child, Ed knew he could no longer make both ends meet out of his daily wage. He tried and tried applying for work abroad until eventually he got a “dirty” job emptying septic tanks of human waste and reconstructing comfort rooms for a hospital in Habibiyah, Iraq.

As a result, he and worksite companions were disallowed from riding the same bus with other employees after working hours.

He also underwent a more unenviable experience of being in a service car escorting a convoy of 15 trucks carrying smelly dead soldiers.

Scores more of such morbid adventures that eventually paid off in later years as a success story are recalled in the book.

“We were like international sacadas,” he said in one of the book chapters, insinuating consolation in the fact that he had surpassed the “local” level of underpaid cane cutters.

Ed got the opportunity to see the late Saddam Hussein while working in the sweltering heat of Iraq.  He was one of those who built the strongman’s underground bunkers.

The paperback version of Tears and Joy may be ordered from the author at CP 09173607624.

May your tribe increase, Ed.