Privatization morphs to 'revitalization'

ILOILO CITY -- “Revitalization” is a nice word nobody can argue with. But in Iloilo City, it is being fiercely opposed by vendors and lessees of public markets.

And public opposition to the revitalization scheme grows because its very proponents are themselves the agitators-in-chief for their lack of transparency, to be more precise, for double speak.

Mayor Jed Patrick Mabilog and his ilk in the city government to include honorable members of the sangguniang panglungsod, have another meaning for it: privatization. They coined the term “revitalization” to cover one that has already been discredited and much hated.

Revitalization, as Mabilog and his ilk would like to tell us, applies to the Iloilo Central Market or the Tienda Mayor, as older denizens call it. Revitalization is being sold as a magic wand that unleashes spectacular benefits on the Tienda Mayor which is an almost decrepit structure that has become became so, not by the fault of its tenants but by sheer neglect of successive administrations.

The magic wand will not only rebuild it into a new structure: it will also transform its lackluster management into honest, diligent and efficient managers. Fine. Nobody would argue with that.

The present management, according to one major revitalization proponent, Kgd. Rodel Fullon Agado, is stacked by “tuklo,” local parlance for thieves.

Revitalization will cleanse the public market of these tuklo. So far, so good.

If ever there is anything good at all that came out from the Agado's “tuklo” expose, it's the ongoing public inquiry in-aid-of-legislation conducted the city council sitting as committee-of-the-whole. The findings in fact speak not just of “tuklo”, like the cat, using stealth and speed, pouncing on a hapless prey. It is not just the “tuklo” that has been unmasked but worse than that.

The statements of resources persons to the inquiry including city administrator Norlito Bautista, point to chronic, systemic broad daylight robbery: market officials committing hanky-pankies like pocketing collections and issuing bogus cash tickets or arkabala.

The more enlightening piece of information reaching the investigating committee points to Vincent De La Cruz, the hatchet man and relative of Mayor Mabilog. The latter appointed by the former head of the Office of Economic Enterprise and market-in-charge.

Resource persons in fact, merely confirmed what most vendors of the public markets knew throughout: the vendors payed the collectors their rents and power and electric bills, the collectors remitted their collections to De La Cruz, and the proceeds stopped right there, never to reach the city treasury.

Other resource persons added that De La Cruz, trusted lackey and relative of Mayor Mabilog, further committed more illegal acts like himself “awarding” lease contracts and colluding with his wife, another city bureaucrat, in occupying one of the stalls at the Terminal Market. The last information came to the open only after a resource person who was being pressed to pay her arrears came forward to explain that the stall registered to her late mother was up-to-date in payments; its arrears accrued only since it was occupied by the De La Cruz couple.

News of privatization of the Tienda Mayor, clothed in the garb of “revitalization” ignited a furor after the 2013 elections, from its lessees and transient vendors, over 300 of them, after city hall signed a memorandum of agreement (MOA) with a giant conglomerate of malls, SM Prime Holdings.

Accordingly, SM will erect a multi-storey edifice on the spot of the public market. The stall occupants and transient vendors were aghast: they smelled rat, they had no idea what was coming, city hall refused to show them the MOA, other than promising them that “legitimate vendors” or those who were registered, won't be displaced. That means, the children, grandchildren, and direct descendants of the registered lessees, are disqualified.

The news of the MOA must have embarrassed city hall for having put the cart ahead of the horse, for having pulled off a MOA sans legislative act. Mayor Mabilog thereafter called a series of meetings with lessees who held their ground: they had only mistrust for their mayor, they won't swallow his verbal assurances for his lack of transparency at the very start.

Mabilog assured them that SM would erect a building and occupy only the second floor and up. The ground floor will be left intact for existing occupants. Nobody believed him. He did not show any paper work to that effect.

Tienda Mayor denizens have gone to court praying to declare the privatization procedure illegal, thus, the ground to restrain it. The case is still pending; the court came short of issuing a restraining order by simply ordering “status quo ante” which means, nobody moves as both parties are ordered to observe the state-of-affairs before the ruckus.

Despite lack of transparency, city hall seems to be blessed with souls whose sense of touch can open pandora boxes. In the course of the inquiry by the city council about a week ago, former Kgd. Perla Zulueta broached to Aksyon Radyo that she was informed by city administrator Norlito Bautista that the ground floor of the building-to-be-built by SM was reserved for Hypermart, the conglomerate's bodega sale version.

That revelation makes the Mabilog administration more depraved of the virtue called transparency.

My hometown, Igbaras (40 km. south of Iloilo City) erected a public market during the incumbency of Mayor Jaime Esmeralda (2001-2010) to the tune of P26 M borrowed from LandBank. In two year, before he stepped down at the end of his final term, the town was able to repay its loan. 

That shows that, if properly managed, public markets of even remote towns, are money-making businessed for LGUs.

That's not the case of Iloilo City. The Central Market or Tienda Mayor makes P45 M a year, where did the money go?

More questions still beg to be asked. Why did Mayor Mabilog name a shadowy character to head the Economic Enterprise Office and market-in-charge? Why did the mayor continue keeping the man after his dubious acts surfaced?

We are just asking because we are in a situation where thieves go unpunished but continue to be coddled. We are in an outrageous point where the very victims – the market lessees and vendors – are blamed as culprits and punished as such.

Privatization will only kill the vendors while thieves laugh their way to their vaults.