For a woman, she had balls, if you ever saw one.
Bravely engaging no less than highest official of the land in a vigorous exchange, the legislator cum doctor made a daring challenge .She said that she and her constituents in the room would walk out of the meeting if the government would pursue its grand intention that she said was a wrong concept. If no one listens, she’s done. Not just in one sense.
Apparently,what drove up Pampanga Fourth District Congresswoman Anna York Bondoc’s adrenalin or blood pressure was the government’s plan to make a portion — 200 hectares of the 2,000-hectare Candaba swamp– into a water impounding dam.
Bondoc didn’t see the plan as a practical solution but as real threat to the food security not only in Pampanga and Central Luzon but in the country, hinting that it will worsen food importation. “At this time of the year”, she said, “ it is only in our district that rice planting is undertaken”. Culture is king, and we’re fine, Mr. President. We have floods around here but how else will we have crabs and prawns?
President Bongbong Marcos insisted that the dam has to be made to serve as catch basin for rainwater flowing upstream before it enters the Pampanga river, which it is no longer moving towards the Manila Bay when it is filled to capacity. Besides, floods in Bulacan can not longer flow to the Manila Bay when the Pampanga River is that.
Bondoc stood unequivocally pat on her position. PBBM, probably at bit unnerved by the congresswoman’s unyielding stand, asked what her suggestion was in lieu of the proposed dam. Desilting, the river, she said, which the President immediately described as temporary and expensive.
As the two were engaged in an unyielding back-and-forth, no less than former President and Congresswoman Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, seated next to Bondoc, was listening. She looked bothered more by intensity of the exchange than by a new dam in that part of her province that she has set aside as the aquaculture center in her own vision. The crab and prawn argument.
It would have been more interesting if the late Levy P. Laus, chairman emeritus of the Pampanga Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PAMCHAM), would have been there. Like his successor and colleagues at PAMCHAM today , Laus spoke of the various adverse effects of flooding to business and economy if it breaches the NLEX, and cut the North from Metro Manila.
He had thought that managing floodwaters from upstream of Pampanga should be part of the solution to prevent them from swelling the Pampanga river and other water channels. He once made an aerial survey of towns along the NLEX in Pampanga and observed that increasing land developments along the expressway will someday caused floodwater to breach it.
We don’t know if he would have favored either an impounding dam or river desilting, but he would have given a more objective, even macro, viewpoint. Or he would have lightened up the room and made the conversation friendlier, as a popular choice of many in the high places or corridors of power.
Like Bondoc, Laus once stood his ground against the initial government plan that it would let nature to take its course at lahar flow started gobbling up portions of Pampanga towns and barangays, and buried one historic town eventually. He was unequivocal, too: dike or die. But unlike the doctor, the countryside taipan, who was dismissed once a by legendary lawmaker as one “who just sells cars”, not only had a brave voice. He had political skills, media savvy, diplomatic skills – a true to type salesman—and he started to catch many people’s attention , from the pedicab drivers’s up to the president’s. The rest, as the cliché goes, is history.
There are, at least, two good reasons why the congresswoman is vehemently against the proposed impending dam in Candaba. Her constituents have convinced her it was not in their interest, safety and economic wise. Politics is always local and can be decisive. May be she remembers an incident when lahar was the greatest fear Pampanga.
There were rumors going around that terrible time that a town would be converted into a catch basin. In other words, lahar like water would be directed and kept in that proposed basin. Residents vehemently opposed such an idea. One police officer, who nearly became the country’s police chief, once told of encountering residents at night with bolos ready to use them against those who will implement the idea.
Of course, it didn’t happen because there no was no such plan. There were no trolls in that in those days ,unlike when PBBM ran to win the presidency in 2016. But bad news , or lies, travels faster than good news. The word got around that a seating congressman was behind the idea of a lahar basin with all the wrath from Mt. Pinatubo. The Nile didn’t matter. He lost his seat in the next congressional election.
Bondoc had made her statement, loud and clear, so her people may know. Building a water impounding dam in the Candaba swamp is not her idea. Any attempt by politicians, present and future, to attribute the idea to her, will not sell. The Bondocs are invincible in their district. Others have tried and failed to break the myth. The dam idea be damned. See you in the 2025 polls.
“The whole aim of practical politics” H.L. Mencken wrote,” is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing them with an endless series of hobglobins, all of them imaginary”. And the doctor-lawmaker-politician hasn’t even raised the fear that the proposed dam could attract more migratory birds from, well, China, and bring diseases to chickens and swine in the area and beyond.
