The 0.97% Optics

CAGAYAN de Oro City ground to a halt yesterday.

If you were stuck in the humongous traffic gridlock that choked the city's thoroughfares, you have City Hall's weekly "People's Day" to thank.

Let's look at the numbers vis-a-vis efficiency in our city government's public service. City Hall proudly touts that 7,193 residents received dole-outs — five kilos of rice, medical consultations, and financial aid.

In a vacuum, 7,193 sounds like a formidable achievement in public service.

But do the math. Cagayan de Oro's official population now stands at 741,617, based on the 2024 PopCen. Those 7,193 beneficiaries represent exactly 0.97 percent of the city.

Given the massive gridlock it created yesterday, that is a mere drop in the bucket. We paralyzed the economic mobility of the remaining 99.03% of Kagay-anons to serve less than one percent.

How much business and productivity was lost yesterday? Every delayed, every employee late to work, and every commercial transaction stalled represents a tangible economic hemorrhage for the city.

When the logistics of a weekly dole-out disrupt the daily engine of a highly urbanized city, we have to question the administration's definition of "public service."

Under Commission on Audit (COA) Circular No. 2012-003, state auditors are tasked to disallow "irregular, unnecessary, excessive, extravagant, and unconscionable" (IUEEU) expenditures. Add to that COA's Value-for-Money (VFM) audits, which measure government programs against three absolute metrics: economy, efficiency, and effectiveness.

When you factor in the massive procurement of dole-out goods, the unquantified economic damage of manufactured traffic jams, and the diversion of salaried City Hall personnel from their mandated desks. One Facebook post even shows a WASAR unit holding back the crowd. 

This leaves critical functions like tax collection, civil registry processing, and essential Frontline services stalled while they play glorified relief workers. Assessed against these metrics, "People's Day" fails the VFM test spectacularly.

Spending highly localized resources in a way that paralyzes the broader city economy is the textbook definition of an unnecessary expense — one that, in COA's own words, "cannot pass the test of prudence" and shows "non-responsivenes to the exigencies of the service."

A 0.97% reach at the expense of citywide paralysis fails the efficiency test.

True governance isn't about setting up tents to manufacture long lines of dependent constituents for the cameras.

It is about creating systems that deliver public services seamlessly, without shutting down the local economy.

If City Hall genuinely wants to bring the government closer to the people, it should decentralize these services efficiently at the barangay level. Whatever happened to the different departments of City Hall? What is the purpose of the bureaucracy if its managers are micromanaging "public service?"

A weekly political circus is no substitute for a working local government bureaucracy. Governance by spectacle is just bad math, and the rest of us Kagay-anons are footing the bill.

The 'Klarex' merch drop

WELCOME to Cagayan de Oro City, no longer a local government unit but an exclusive streetwear brand, with Mayor Rolando Uy acting as the lead designer.

It seems he isn't just running a city; he's managing a flagship store.

Every waiting shed, basketball court backboards, relief pack, public service vehicle, and stray hollow block is now a canvas for that signature neon green cursive. 

You’d think City Hall was a marketing agency trying to win a billboard award.

It’s gotten so out of hand that even the Commission on Audit (COA) was forced to act as unwilling fashion critics. In their 2024 annual audit report, COA flagged this aggressive branding a staggering 13 times.

You know your ego has outpaced your governance when state auditors are spending their time counting your autographs instead of just the receipts.

And speaking of receipts, the Department of the Interior and Local Government is currently demanding answers about a heavily delayed P250-million fund downloaded from the Department of Budget Management.

What exactly is the holdup? Are we sitting on a quarter of a billion pesos because City Hall hasn't figured out how to print that green cursive directly onto the cash yet? Why rush massive public funds when the sticker designs for the rollout haven't been finalized?

Photo from City Information Office's official Facebook account

Sabon panglaba ka ba nga kinahanglan dili malupigan ni Brand X? Pagbaton pud og kaulaw, uy!

Let’s clear up the confusion: this is public administration, not a detergent war where you need to aggressively out-market Ariel or Tide at the sari-sari store. Public service is supposed to be about the people, not a city-wide personal calligraphy exhibit.

Let’s remind ourselves of the actual sponsor here: Kwarta sa mga Kagay-anon ang gipangtatakan sa berde nga logo.

Taxpayers are funding city infrastructure, not a 'Klarex' sponsorship deal. It is the political equivalent of buying a gift with your own money, wrapping it yourself, and watching someone else aggressively sign the gift tag in permanent marker.

Public service speaks for itself; it doesn't need a watermark.

If the urge to brand everything is truly that uncontrollable, we might as well just start tattooing that green cursive directly on the taxpayers' foreheads.

At least then the merch would accurately reflect who actually footed the bill. Pfft.

We are not influencers

I didn’t learn how to corner an evasive and shifty politician or dissect a local government budget just to optimize my headlines for an algorithm designed to sell a food supplement or another crypto scam.

Yet, here we are.

The line between a news feed and a digital carnival has been completely blurred, if not deleted altogether.

We are competing for attention with conspiracy theorists, viral stunts, and an endless stream of pure, unadulterated fluff.

If journalism wants to survive this era of algorithmic noise, our superpower cannot be going viral. Our superpower has to be the unapologetic, often unglamorous pursuit of the facts — because when the spectacle ends, the people still need to know who pocketed the city’s budget for infrastructure projects.

Let’s be the adults in the room.

Somehow, newsrooms decided the best way to stay relevant was to act like desperate influencers. We are trading shoe-leather reporting for desk-bound aggregation, regurgitating trending topics, and slapping sensationalist, clickbait headlines on absolute non-stories just to keep our daily metrics from flatlining

.

But let’s be brutally honest: trying to out-entertain the entertainment industry doesn't make the press look hip.

It makes us look like a desperate uncle doing a TikTok dance at a wake. Trying to beat social media algorithms at their own game is a fool’s errand that degrades the profession and turns the Fourth Estate into a cheap circus act.

The tech billionaires have designed their platforms so that form is king. Everything must be bite-sized, visually stimulating, and immediately enraging. But look where it has gotten us.

If form is king in their digital fiefdoms, then substance and context must be queen in ours. And historically speaking, queens outlast kings.

Form can never truly defeat substance.

You cannot simply shove flowers into an asshole and start calling it a vase. A polished, highly-produced viral reel of a press conference doesn’t change the underlying fact that the official at the podium is lying through their teeth.

The antidote to this industry-wide brain rot isn’t a savvier social media manager or a better hashtag strategy; it’s a return to gritty, old-fashioned investigative reporting.

It’s time we put the human rights lens back on the camera. Social media ignores the actual marginalized stories because systemic rot and the daily survival of those in the city’s margins don’t naturally trend.

They require reading comprehension and a modicum of empathy — two things the algorithm actively suppresses.

The public doesn’t need another 15-second video summarizing a politician’s idiotic tweet.

They need dogged reporters digging into why city hall’s record-keeping is suspiciously deficient, or why the exact same communities are left to drown every time a storm hits.

We are here to document the real-world body count of bad governance, not to serve up cheap internet brownie points. We are here to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, not to be the internet’s court jesters.

Trust is the only currency journalism actually owns. If we trade it for cheap clicks and fleeting engagement, we will bankrupt ourselves.

Propaganda and fake news thrive in an environment where everything is treated as light entertainment and all information is equally worthless.

If journalism wants to survive, we have to draw a hard line in the sand.

Let the content creators have their ring lights, their viral dances, and their engagement bait. We’ll take the public records, the hard questions, and the unvarnished truth.

Veritas Liberabit Vos.