The emperor’s new ‘crisis communications’

ATTACKING local media with your “crisis comms,” composed of supposed ideologues of media past, is not how you tackle the questions of Kagay-anons.

It is, to put it mildly, a strategic and tactical error of the highest order.

Questions of accountability, transparency, and governance are not mosquitoes to be swatted away by your brigade of known spin doctors, paid hacks, and trolls; they are the bedrock of the office you hold. 

Threatening broadcasters to shut up because they are not cowing to the narrative you are selling is a tactic that belongs in a black-and-white newsreel from the 1970s, not in a modern, aspirational metropolis. 

This is not how a democratic city is supposed to function, nong.

You seem to be operating under the delusion that if you muzzle the weatherman, it will stop raining. 

But the rain — and the traffic — remains.

Let us speak of the traffic woes of the city. 

While the City Engineer’s office proudly releases lists of “233 completed infrastructure projects,” the daily reality for the commuter suggests otherwise. 

We are told of P97 million allocated for flood control projects extending into 2026 to prevent another Sendong, yet the streets of the highway remain a parking lot at the slightest drizzle. 

The disconnect between the press release and the pavement is jarring. 

One has ample time to contemplate the existential void while idling near the stalled drainage projects that seem to serve as monuments to bureaucratic inertia rather than engineering solutions.

And then, the matter of the “Task Force Basura.”

It is a branding triumph, certainly — giving a military-sounding name to the basic parochial function of picking up trash. But why did it require a “Task Force” and an “ultimatum” to solve a problem that should never have existed? 

While the administration now trumpets the arrival of a new contractor to clear the backlog, the stench of the previous months lingers. It raises the question: if the system was working, why the sudden need for emergency measures?

You’re protesting the allegations with the vigor of a man trying to convince a mirror he is handsome.

“The gentleman doth protest too much,” Shakespeare might have noted. 

Lest we forget the water crisis that forced you to declare a State of Emergency earlier this year. When the dispute between the COWD and the bulk water supplier threatens to turn the taps dry, it is not an “act of God” or “force majeure” — it is a failure of foresight and contract management.

It is failed act of a micro-managing, overly-sensitive, political ignoramus.

Governance is not about winning the morning news cycle.

It is about ensuring the garbage truck arrives without a press conference, the traffic flows without a police escort, and a weekly social welfare service that doesn’t need to be named after you — an elected official.

You cannot PR your way out of a traffic jam. 

You cannot spin a pile of uncollected trash into gold. 

And you certainly cannot bully a city into believing that competence is present when the evidence of its absence is parked, unpaid, and uncollected, right outside their door.

Pfft.