"Will Domagoso take the leap?"
"Will Domagoso take the leap?"
Over a dinner with friends last Saturday night, a highly respected advertising guru told a small group of political “animals” (guys who work on the sidelines to make politicians win elections but by themselves have no interest in running): “The coming elections are quite interesting. Two guys who lost in 2016, one for vice-president and another for senator, are the hottest presidentiables five years after, save for the President’s daughter.”
He was referring of course to Bongbong Marcos and Francisco “Isko” Moreno Domagoso. Bongbong’s electoral protest against Leni Robredo is still pending before the Supreme Court. Isko was forced to run for Senate, goaded by then Mayor Joseph Estrada who reneged on a single-term promise made to his then vice-mayor in 2013, so as to come up with a single strong force against Mayor Fred Lim.
Isko ran under the ticket of Grace Poe. Ample funding promised by Erap later turned out into dribbled trickles, while other senatorial candidates spent hundreds of millions. Still, Isko made a respectable showing: No. 16, beating a well-known brand, TG Guingona, whose father was senator and vice-president, by close to 800,000 votes nationwide.
Defeat in 2016 turned providential. Jobless, as in “PMA” or “pahinga muna ako,” which he told Pres. Duterte in a palace meeting. The latter laughed and gave him a job, that of chairman and president of North Luzon Railways Corporation, the GOCC attached to DoTR which was supposed to oversee the re-construction of the PNR line from Tutuban to Ilocos. The project was botched during the GMA administration and mothballed by the succeeding Aquino presidency.
No longer “pahinga,” Isko had big plans, like a “tranvia” from the Camanava terminal of PNR to Manila, connecting Roxas Boulevard to the highly populous northern cities. But somehow, he was “lectured” upon by DOTR Sec. Art Tugade in a stormy meeting of the board, which the young Isko could not take, and forthwith submitted his resignation.
Still, Duterte had him appointed as Undersecretary in the Social Welfare department, where he stayed a few months before filing his certificate of candidacy under Asenso Manileño for the mayorship of the city where he was born, grew up, and served as councilor for nine years and vice-mayor for another nine.
Setbacks, like the 2016 senatorial defeat, and the encounter with the voluble Tugade, followed by help from Duterte became stepping stones to greater political glory. For in stunning fashion, Isko Moreno won in 2019 over a former president and two-term mayor and another come-backing mayor who was once senator and DILG secretary.
Overnight, Isko Moreno became a political enfant terrible, a David who slew political giants with an overwhelming 51 percent of the vote in a three-cornered battle, and besting an entrenched incumbent by a 147,000 vote margin, a first in the history of the nation’s capital city.
And then the youngest mayor in the city’s history wowed Manileños and the rest of the country with decisive actions and projects that many who had given up on the city’s future found astounding.
In speedy successive manner, he rid Divisoria, the country’s lower middle class shopping mecca of illegal vendors who choked its streets, and who were fleeced day by miserable day for their street occupancy by “tong” collectors. Traffic which shunned the area began to move, and the vendors relocated so they would cease to obstruct both vehicular and pedestrian traffic.
The detritus that made Manila streets a “brokedown place” of ugly filth was now regularly collected; the streets cleaned up. Darkened major thoroughfares were lit up, and even during the bleak COVID Christmas season, native capiz lamps festooned the trees and white parols with no epal messages decked the lampposts. How easy it would have been to print “I (heart) Manila,” which coincide with Isko Moreno’s initials, as has been wont in almost every other city in the metropolis. But Moreno found distasteful.
The neglected subterranean passages built by former mayors Lacson and Villegas of became alive with illuminated wall screens depicting the city’s colorful history and its storied attractions. Parks and gardens were spruced up, and new pocket gardens built.
Paying real estate taxes and business permits could now be done online, innovated by a mayor who understands modern communications technology. The young mayor spoke before almost every association of businessmen in the capital region including the elite Makati Business Club, engaging them to return to Manila and revive the city’s business environment.
Last week, new business applications in Manila went up by 42 percent year-on-year, despite the ongoing pandemic, a health crisis which Manila’s Yorme managed very well in sync with the national government.
Testing centers, “ayuda” distribution went smoothly, though in fairness other young NCR chief executives did well too. Manila took the lead in procuring the needed cold storage facilities for the forthcoming vaccines, all installed in a modern hospital in Sta. Ana district, for all types of temperature requirements. Vaccination simulation has been effected, to ensure that when the vaccines arrive, Manila could effect a seamless time and motion roll-out.
Last week, Yorme Isko announced the beginning of a six-month distribution of “food security packages” to each and every household in his city, all 700,000 of them, with an appeal to the more affluent to share their food packs with the less fortunate. This gesture of assistance is being done amid soaring food prices.
All these accomplishments are properly communicated through social media platforms, which also explain Yorme’s appeal to millennials and Gen Zers.
He has bought parcels of private land upon which will rise socialized housing buildings, complete with elevators, Tondominiums and Binondominiums, he calls these, where unusually spacious 42 square meter units will be leased to former illegal settlers. It is his way, Yorme explains, of giving back, considering his lowly “squatter” origins, moving from hovel to hovel.
And that is where his life narrative becomes very compelling.
The son of a stevedore in Manila’s North Harbor, and a housewife who peeled garlic in the urban warrens of Tondo and Parola, one from Antique and the other from Samar, Isko had to work at early age to add to the family income. He scoured garbage bins for bote dyaryo to re-sell, and “pagpag” or restaurant left-overs which his mother would wash and then re-cook for the night’s dinner. In short, he knows what it is like to be among the poorest of the poor.
He was only a “high school finish” when he was elected councilor of Manila, brought to politics after good looks made him an actor and television entertainer. But upon the prodding of then Vice-Mayor Danny Lacuna, whom he considers his second “tatay,” he enrolled for a college degree at age 26; thence to two years of law school; taking short governance courses at the University of the Philippines NCPAG. Later as vice-mayor, he was able to wangle training scholarships to Harvard and even Oxford, two of the world’s venerable institutions of high learning.
Yorme is obviously driven, a young man who will turn 47 in October this year, the same age as Duterte’s assistant and now senator Bong Go, but a bit older than Duterte’s daughter Inday Sara and the pugilist Pacman.
But he has thus far matched his ambitions with accomplishments never before seen in the nation’s capital city, which qualifies him in the public imagination as a president-to-be.
Poll surveys in the last month of 2020 show him a strong second or third in the public esteem behind front-runner Inday Sara Duterte, with a Bongbong Marcos close by.
Still qualified for easy and certain re-election as Manila mayor, will Yorme take a quick leap into the presidency of the benighted land?
He has to make up his mind soon, for the Comelec has just announced that the first week of October is filing time. Still, as everyone knows, preparations for the biggest political lotto takes months before filing.
Will Yorme take the leap?