The trouble with being everyone’s Inday

The anti-epal era has arrived in Iloilo, and its first suspect is the most common name in the province.

Lawyer Josiah David Quising has asked the Department of the Interior and Local Government to investigate Iloilo City Mayor Raisa Treñas-Chu over “TLC ni Inday,” the city’s livelihood program for small vendors, mostly women. His theory, citing DILG Memorandum Circular No. 2026-006, is that the program borrows the mayor’s nickname and so runs afoul of the prohibition on stamping a public official’s “name, image, or likeness” onto government work. He wants an investigation, a determination, a removal of offending materials, and “such further administrative or disciplinary action as may be proper.”

On its face, this is delicious. “Inday” is not a brand; it is the ambient soundtrack of Western Visayas. Half the women in any barangay answer to it. Your tindera is Inday. Your tita is Inday. The woman who sells you batchoy at midnight is Inday, and so, probably, is her daughter. To police “ni Inday” as the proprietary mark of one politician is to declare open season on a term of endearment older than the republic. By that logic, the next casualty is every Boy, Toto, Nonoy, and Manang in Philippine public life, and we will need a memorandum circular the length of a phone book.

Except here is where the mayor cannot fully duck. Her certificate of candidacy lists her ballot name as “INDAY RAISA.” She did not inherit that “Inday” passively from the regional ether; she spent a campaign teaching voters that, in this city, “Inday” means her. Brand equity is brand equity. You cannot run on a nickname, win on a nickname, and then insist the nickname is just folk warmth when it turns up on the seed-capital tarpaulin. The “TLC” — Tindahan, Livelihood, and Cart, though the tender-loving-care echo is surely not an accident — leans on affection the office worked hard to manufacture. If “ni Inday” reads as a personal stamp, that is partly because the personal stamp was the campaign’s whole point.

So that is her share of the heat. Now the complainant’s.

An anti-epal complaint is, in principle, a fine and bracing thing. Public goods are not personal favors, and the instinct to keep a politician’s face off the public’s money is healthy. But this particular complaint did not arrive in a vacuum. According to a screenshot furnished to the Daily Guardian, the email to Secretary Jonvic Remulla’s office also tagged DILG Undersecretary Jed Patrick Mabilog — formerly of this city, presently of the Gugma camp, which is to say the rival of Treñas-Chu’s Rise. A compliance grievance that arrives pre-addressed to the target’s chief political opponent is not wearing a poker face. It is wearing a campaign button. Discovering a sudden, citation-formatted devotion to neutrality precisely when it inconveniences the other side is its own small genre of epal — call it epal by complaint.

The city, for its part, has perfected the bureaucratic shrug. Spokesperson Joy Fantilaga-Gorzal says the office has “seen reports circulating online” but cannot comment because no official copy has been “formally served.” This is the governmental version of reading a message and leaving it unanswered because, technically, you have not opened it. Due process is real and worth respecting; it is also, in the right hands, an excellent way to say nothing for as long as possible. Meanwhile Remulla’s office has forwarded the letter to its “administrative team,” that gentle euphemism for the place where letters go to think things over indefinitely.

Strip away the comedy and there is a genuine principle worth protecting, which is exactly why it should not be spent carelessly. Anti-epal rules work only if they are applied to faces and names across camps, not unsheathed whenever a rival’s program gets popular. A good tool used as a partisan club dulls for everyone, until the next mayor — Rise, Gugma, or otherwise — points it right back.

So the fault here is, once again, evenly distributed. The mayor turned an endearment into a ballot line and then into a banner, and should not be shocked that someone noticed. The complainant found his principle at the most convenient possible moment, with the most convenient possible person copied in. And somewhere in an inbox, an administrative team is forming a committee.

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