[] Did the mayor’s, ambassadors’ and other VIPs’ motorcycle escorts use flashing lights and sirens to cut through traffic? VM Osmeña didn’t specify.
[] Law and administrative edicts and presidential orders prohibit all motor vehicles, except for the five highest officials of the land,who clearly don’t include mayors and governors.
Remember the ‘Wangwang ban’?
In his 2010 inaugural address, then president Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III announced a “no Wangwang policy.” President Bongbong. Marcos “revived” the ban in April 2024, although the Noynoy order must still stand.
Local officials may have forgotten the original 16-year-old presidential order, but they must have read and still remember BBM’s two-year-old order.
Noynoy Aquino’s symbolism must have struck the officialdom’s core: “no Wangwang” rejects “VIP entitlement, corruption and mindset.”
The “Wangwang” ban is not just aimed at faster flow of vehicles. It is both symbolic and cautionary: The high official is not above the law, must not feel and act entitled to the privilege of avoiding the hassle of congestion on the streets, and is duly warned of consequences in case of disobedience.
Law, admin orders prohibit escorts Even minus presidential pronouncement, the prohibitions are there in the statute books:
-- Presidential Decree #96 criminalizes the act of attaching or using sirens, bells, blinkers or flashing devices, unless authorized by law. But if the local officials use police, military, NBI, or fire department vehicles, is that not a way of going around the law?
-- It is, but LTO rules and a 1998 presidential memorandum restrict the use of police motorcycle escorts and sirens to only the highest government officials: the president, vice president, Senate president, House speaker, and Supreme Court chief justice.
By those rules, mayors and governors cannot use those escorts.And wait, why blame ambassadors and other VIPs when their host officials, not they, are responsible for the traffic violations?
Consequences for violation
To those who wonder at the consequence of Mayor Archival’s alleged traffic violations, wonder still.
VM Osmeña named the mayor at least twice in the same setting, a City Council executive session, as the “biggest violator of traffic rules,” along with ambassadors and other VIPs and someone named “Dara.”
What would happen, other than having VM Tomas’s rebuke (“kasaba”) played repeatedly and widely across the city?
Obviously, none. The vice mayor wouldn’t sue, let alone seek to reprimand him officially in the City Council. Maybe Archival’s potential rivals in the 2028 election would manage to file a complaint somewhere.
But Tomas thrashing Nestor and Nestor fighting back? They’re BOPK party-mates, party leader and sub-leader, mentor and mentee.
City Hall watchers may not see the rope that binds Nestor with Tomas break, despite having seen similar ties snap a number of times in the past.
What Tomas got was theater
The vice mayor must have believed that he could properly make a “manifestation” like a regular councilor, at least before DILG, or Department of the Interior and Local Government, would rule as beyond the power of the vice mayor/presiding officer. (He or anyone else could speak out on anything but not within the City Council when he’s presiding the session.)
He got theater, which couldn’t have been better if he had made his complaint at a presscon or any forum outside the Sanggunian halls.