This week, the huge chunk of Philippine voters got a pre-Christmas treat of something to ponder or pick on.
Right at the heat of campaign or no-campaign seasons as yet, Liberal Party and President Noynoy Aquino’s fair-haired boy played light on a claim that Davao City’s peace and order calling it a myth.
The peace and order situation in the country’s biggest city got into Roxas, sensing that this single fact is helping propel presidential competitor Rodrigo Duterte to scrape the ceilings of social media survey groups.
And it is yet Duterte’s second week after fulfilling a nail-biting submission of his Presidential bid at the Comelec, officially killing all speculations about this fairly unpredictable man’s not running from a fight.
With most people sensing that a discipline-blighted Philippines has no need of a Wharton economics degree, people looked at Davao, a city that thrives in the borders of terror as a possible redemption.
Sitting on an island while its neighbors make money out of kidnap-for ransom, terror bombing and drug-trade, it would be legendary for Davao to just sit there and be topping country’s peace and order situation.
Well, like every social scientist would say, peace and order is never just about instilling fear, because that can happen in a civil unrest and yet there is no peace. And order.
But unlike those lit with unrest, Davao has its police organization, justice system and penology all worked up. This is the city that had a mayor offering a nice punch to a prosecutor for the latter’s apparent ego trip.
And when a heaping serving of justice is needed and the systemic legal process is excruciatingly slow, this is also a city that has a mythical blindfolded lady in draping robes.
Here, criminals and undesirables have a nasty habit of getting found, lifeless and a bloating lesson for everyone with the intent to beat the country’s wretched systems.
Here, either criminals, die or they flee, whichever is profitable for them. So, you have a city that some ranking services hoists up as among the world’s most peaceful.
And this, apparently irked Mar Roxas and his minions.
Roxas is simply wanting to hit on Duterte, but a Wharton School training tells him to pick on Davao’s Peace and Order, calling it a myth.
You see, at Daang Matuwid which Roxas vows to continue, they also have this nasty habit of opening up their mouths faster than their economic brains to process. Some have a queer way of saying it: foot and mouth disease.
That is when they contrive of saying something brilliant, they end up hurting their feet.
This said, you have Mar Roxas, former DILG Chief who has the police under his command, also bolstered saying Davao police are epic failures. And he said it, as if it is Mamasapano and he was kept in the blind despite his being DILG.
Indeed the police have lost a significant chunk of morale with the way the politics is gaining into the DILG. They even said what Robredo built in years, it only took a single Yolanda incident to wash out.
And as the Daang Matuwid has been a constant war cry for the Liberal, every time Roxas or its Liberal party lame duck president opens its mouth, some bad thing is going to happen.
This has become a battle between what is mythical and what is legendary.
What is just unfortunate is that which is legendary peace and order is now tagged as mythical, while the myth in Daang Matuwid has been stuffed to us as legendary. So you ask, where the fail is?