Superfluous billboard

Veronica Mendoza of Quezon City wrote the Philippine Daily Inquirer about superfluous billboard, specifically the one at the Rizal Park. She laments the patronage politics that has characterized Philippine leadership and perfected to harrowingly scandalous proportions by my favorite president.

Well, for a while and after the May 2004 elections, these billboards were removed but my favorite president's spin doctors realized the PR bonanza that the SEA Games affords them. Voila! The billboards are back!

Read her letter which was published on page A14 of the December 6, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

I grew up taking early morning walks with my grandmother on the grounds of Rizal Park. In the process, I got curious and eventually seek an answer to this question: “Why should one person deserve to have a huge park named after him?”

To this day, I can’t help but feel proud every time I pass by that person’s monument and what it stands for. For me, there is only one “superstar” in that park, and that is Jose Rizal. And so it makes me so uneasy to see that other people are trying to grab the limelight from him.

I refer to the billboard placed quite near the Rizal Monument, announcing the Rizal Park Rehabilitation Project, with the President and tourism secretary claiming its success. My salary contributed to that project. So if there’s any face that needs to be there, it should be mine.

This is so typical a scene anywhere in this country, further reinforcing the patronage politics of false indebtedness to political leaders. We often see billboards that thank a certain mayor or congressman for a paved 300-meter road that used to be of a dirt road.

This practice has to stop. What we want to see is the proper accounting as to how government resources are being used. Tell us through those billboards how much is the cost of a project, who is doing the work, and when it is set to be completed. And for goodness sake, thank the people for the tax they paid, which made the project possible.

Please take down that billboard in Rizal Park, or I will assemble a group from the PRO-Gun Society and get them to shout “Fuego” as they aim at the billboard.