I woke up Thursday morning to the news that Cesar Chavez, a good and loyal friend, an able assistant who was always ready to help, resigned abruptly as Undersecretary for Rail in the beleaguered Department of Transportation.
Everybody and his mother knows the DoTr is in one hell of a mess, particularly insofar as its rail operations are concerned. Cynosure of public attention and target of its daily wrath is the MRT 3, which spans the busiest transport artery of Metro Manila.
Secretary Tugade and his team inherited a monumental headache from the previous administration, which botched the operations and maintenance of the public train big-time. I shall not belabor these any longer; the public knows all the loose nuts and bolts of the criminally negligent and apparently larcenous manner the MRT has been through the years run.
Philippine Star columnist Jarius Bondoc has made an unending crusade of exposing the incompetence and scandalous manner by which public trains have been run to the ground, just as he has unearthed many other anomalies in agencies led by the three As of the Aquino administration. These three A’s refer to the first letter of the surnames of the favorite cabinet members of the President Rodrigo Duterte succeeded. Apart from Mamasapano, the trio constituted the primary reasons why Benigno S. Aquino III, son of the revered Ninoy whose birthday we commemorate today, has transmogrified from a leader who gave us all a reason to hope in 2010 to an object of rejected disillusion.
Try reading Jarius’ article last Friday, Nov. 24 on the MRT 3 and Cesar Chavez’s sudden resignation and know why Cesar, in a burst of exasperation over excruciatingly endless accidents after aberrations, gave up.
It certainly was not any of Art Tugade’s doing. The secretary was as surprised as everybody else, and his instant reaction, even as he was in sickbay at the time, was to iterate his full trust and confidence in his undersecretary.
Cesar absorbed the faults of others in that caboodle called the MRT. Not one to stand by and simply pass on responsibility and fault to others, he manned up to the near impossible task of making broken trains run, as in daily trying to patch up the Humpty-Dumpty dumped upon the Duterte administration by years and years of graft and incompetence.
But that was characteristic of the intrepid Chavez. I remember him as the daring DZRH reporter who broadcast from the battle lines of the coups d’etat against President Cory even as bullets whizzed past him. Anything to get his job done.
I was honored, along with President Fidel V. Ramos, to be his “ninong” when he got married in simple rites at the Paco chapel in 1992. It was the late Joe Taruc, another esteemed friend who passed away this year, who introduced Cesar Chavez to me when I was still a newbie in government.
There were times when we supported different politicians, as when I was for Ping Lacson while he helped Noli de Castro, who ran and won as GMA’s vice president. But we always respected each other.
From the early stirrings of the Duterte candidacy, dismissed by many in officialdom and media as an “impossible dream,” Cesar was supportive of the man in whose capabilities, character and resolve I likewise worked for.
To be clear, an undersecretary is not a Chief Executive Officer. Neither is he the Chief Operations Officer in the MRT, or LRT, or PNR, or whatever else passes for a railway contraption in this benighted land. An undersecretary is a staff position, there to coordinate the program implementation of the line agencies entrusted to him by the secretary of the department.
But for want of enough support or effort from the guy whom Jarius Bondoc described as the “absentee ex-general” who heads the MRT, Cesar Chavez took on the public face of the decrepit agency where he had NO line authority.
He it was who would go to the railway tracks when an “aberya” happened. Even at the break of dawn. He it was who explained to the public incessantly, and assured them that the DoTr was trying its best, trying to coax some embers of patience from a public so crucified daily by the transport and traffic mess.
He it was who that maintenance contractor BURI, whatever stupid words intertwine into its meaning, sued for breach of their irregular contract hatched during the previous administration. And Cesar took it on the chin, knowing that he stood for what was, and is, right.
He had, as I assured him the other day, done everything humanly possible. I fully understand why he gave up and filed an irrevocable resignation. And I sympathize with Secretary Art for losing a good man.
Even his choice of timing showed his respect for his boss. He did it on a Thursday, even if he intimated that he decided to give up earlier. He wanted to spare his boss or the department from one week of media attention. A sudden Thursday resignation and no interviews thereafter. Friday up, and it was over, or so Cesar would have wanted. He knows his media play very well. Till the end, Cesar deferred to his immediate superior.
As another friend, Arnold Clavio in his Abante column said, “Hail, Cesar!”
Cesar returns to the Manila Broadcasting Company, which runs the nationwide DZRH and its affiliated stations. Fare thee well, my friend. Chill!