Ynion to Mayor Joe III: IPC building will be our legacy

“I don't fight for the money. I fight for my legacy. I fight for history. I fight for my people.”
--Khabib Nurmagomedov

By Alex P. Vidal

LIKE Octavius and Mark Antony, the relationship between Iloilo City Mayor Jose “Joe III” Espinosa III and Iloilo Press Club (IPC) President Rommel Ynion is cool and professional.
Politics will have to take a back seat, this time.
When Antony and Octavius have a difference of opinion as to cutting Lepidus out in dividing the spoils of war, Octavius lets Antony have the last word.
Octavius (who became Emperor Octavian) raises some objections, but does not argue with the former right hand of murdered Roman Emperor Julius Caesar.
In a recent social media post, Ynion, like Octavius, asked Mayor Joe III: “Are you still serious in keeping your promise to help us secure the necessary permits to use the IPC building?”
“We have envisioned it to be a center for learning to help professionalize the media,” added Ynion.
“One of its features will be a library for students of journalism where they can deepen their knowledge on history, politics, and literature with the aid of books donated by our benefactors.”

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Like Antony, Mayor Joe III’s word will take precedence over that of Ynion.
The city mayor will have the last word.
Everyone in the IPC will be waiting on tenterhooks for Mayor Joe III’s reply.
Ynion wrote: “I have seen you a few times on live Facebook video programs promising your audience including in one episode Manuel Mejorada that you would help us in the Iloilo Press Club (IPC) get city hall permits for our building.
“The IPC building has been the subject of many controversies over the years including the case implicating Congressman Jerry Trenas in an alleged anomaly related to the release of Php 500,000 for its construction.
“I have declared myself a friend of everyone. As such, I will not comment anymore on this issue bedeviling the congressman retired as I am from any form of political, economic and social activities.
“My hermit-like existence has defanged me. I would rather embrace peace than conflict in dealing with issues especially the one concerning the IPC bulding."

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Unlike Romulus who killed his twin brother Remus and name Ancient Rome after himself, Ynion is inviting Mayor Joe III to “leave a legacy of our immutable values especially in the world of journalism where the highest standards of professionalism can endure with your help.”
Ynion wants to share IPC’a future glory with Mayor Joe III in exchange for his help and cooperation as the highest official of Iloilo City.
Ynion, who has pumped a personal money of P500,000 in the IPC building, appealed: “Mayor Joe, we need your help to make our dream a reality. It is a dream borne not out of personal ambition but out of our love for the journalistic profession and its practitioners.
“We will owe you a debt of gratitude which will last forever if only you can see and act on the importance of the IPC Building through the prism of our collective hopes for the future of journalism in Iloilo City. Madamo gid nga salamat.”
The ball is on your court, Mayor Joe III.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)

Iloilo Press Club loses ‘Pericles’

“A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.”
--Paul Valery

By Alex P. Vidal

NEW YORK CITY -- It’s good that the erstwhile fractious Iloilo Press Club (IPC), now under the leadership of Rommel Ynion, is united and not anymore bedeviled by discord and identity crisis.
IPC, the oldest press club in Asia, was ushered into the Golden Age during the leadership of its main pillar, Daniel “Danny" or "DF” Fajardo, just like the Golden Age of Athens during the Age of Pericles (494-429 B.C.).
The IPC election in 1996, one of the most well-attended elections in the club’s history, catapulted Fajardo, founder and publisher of Panay News, into the presidency where he beat Daily Informer publisher Bernie Miaque and GMA-7 manager Joey (Lopez) Melliza.
It also signaled the club’s Renaissance; from then on, IPC never turned its back.
It was during Fajardo’s presidency that IPC acquired the lot in Molo district, where the three-storey building was built later and financed by Ynion, a journalist and philanthropist, who became Fajardo’s friend.
I vividly recalled that fleeting moment in 1996 when Iloilo Governor Art Defensor, Iloilo City Mayor Mansueto Malabor, among other city and provincial officials, attended the ground-breaking ceremony for the building construction, which was delayed by politics and vacillations of City Hall politicians after Malabor.

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Fajardo led the IPC at the time when journalism was reduced to a simple tautology: It was whatever Ilonggo journalists said it was. “We let our work speak for itself,” Maxwell King, the former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, has said.
Or, when pressed, we take it as a given that we work in the public interest.
As Fajardo’s vice president for two consecutive years (1996-1997), I witnessed how the flamboyant publisher helped restore the respect and admiration of national leaders to members of the Fourth Estate in Western Visayas.
The late Senator Blas Ople and former Senator Francisco “Kit” Tatad, both intellectual behemoths way back during the Marcos years, were among those who were tantalized by the talents of Iloilo journalists.
If they did not come to Iloilo City to grace some important media events as guest speakers, Ople and Tatad, et al hosted the enterprising Team Fajardo in Manila and provided them with adequate “atay and batikolon” (liver and intestines) Fajardo’s most favorite semantics.

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Former Senators Nikki Coseteng, Joey Lina, Tito Guingona, Raul Roco, Leticia Ramos Shahani, former President and now House Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, former Presidents Fidel V. Ramos and Joseph Estrada, now Manila mayor, among other national figures, were so impressed by the way Iloilo journalists led by the late Teddy Sumaray (who spoke like Anaxagoras), and Herbert Vego, both former IPC presidents; and Atty. Ernie Dayot, known as “Iloilo’s Socrates”, delivered their questions.
The glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome; the magnificence that was IPC under DF, himself a master orator like Pericles, whose speeches and elegies, recorded and possibly interpreted by Thucydides, celebrated the greatness of a democratic Athens at its peak.
I was with DF when we attended a big party in a Manila hotel many years ago where he was asked at random to deliver an impromtu speech.
Although unprepared, DF rose to the challenge and belted the following line by Pericles:
“In doing good, again, we are unlike others; we make our friends by conferring, not by receiving favors. Now he who confers a favor is the firmer friend, because he would rather by kindness keep alive the memory of an obligation; but the recipient is colder in his feelings, because he knows that in requiting another's generosity he will not be winning gratitude but only paying a debt. We alone do good to our neighbors not upon a calculation of interest, but in the confidence of freedom and in a frank and fearless spirit.”
University of the East (UE) College of Law Dean Amado Valdez, who was seated with us in one table, was among those who stood up and shook DF’s hand with a jarring astonishment.
Fajardo, who passed away on September 10, 2018 at the Asian Hospital and Medical Center in Alabang, Muntinlupa City in the Philippines at 72, hosted the radio program “Reklamo Publiko” aired “live” simultaneously over Aksyon Radyo and Cable Star at the Hotel Del Rio for several years.
We will surely miss the one and only Pericles and father of the Iloilo Press Club in our generation, President DF!
Rest in Peace and ‘til we meet again, Praeses Dominus.

I salute Rep. Treñas

"A clear and innocent conscience fears nothing."
--Elizabeth I

By Alex P. Vidal

NEW YORK CITY -- Even if he did not benefit a single centavo but was unceremoniously "punished" for doing what he thought was the right thing to do, Iloilo City lone district Rep. Jerry P. Treñas gamely faced the ax and did not contest the unjust 90-day preventive suspension meted by the Sandiganbayan.
Treñas was Iloilo City mayor when he ordered the release of Senator Loren Legarda's priority development assistance fund (PDAF) worth P500,000 for the construction of the Iloilo Press Club (IPC) building in Molo district more than 15 years ago.
Under the law, Legarda could not release the money direct to the IPC being a private organization, thus it was sent through the city hall as intermediary local government agency.
As soon as the fund was available and when the IPC sought Treñas' help, he ordered the release of the money in full amount.
For helping both Legarda in particular, and the IPC in general, Treñas ended up in hot water.
In Tagalog parlance, siya ang bahala, siya pa ang naging kawawa. In Hiligaynon, siya pa ang nag bulig, siya pa ang nalinti-ian.

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To his shock and horror, Treñas found himself a recipient of the Ombudsman case filed before the Sandiganbayan.
His crime?
Treñas supposedly gave “unwarranted benefits, advantage or preference” to the IPC “which was not an accredited non-government organization (NGO) of the city.”
He also allegedly violated Commission on Audit’s Circular No. 96-003 for "failure to monitor the implementation of the project and failure to require fund liquidation."
Here's another case of a good and decent public official being canned not because he stole the taxpayers' money, but because he overlooked certain technicalities when he issued a clean edict.
Amid all the hullabaloo on the issue, we never heard Treñas complain against this clear injustice done against him.
As a lawyer, the congressman wanted to deal the issue in a legal manner sans banter and blunderbuss.
Because his conscience is clear, Treñas elected to face the charges like Sir Thomas More, who, after reciting the Miserere while kneeling before his execution by beheading in 1872, rose up merrily, kissed the man who was about to decapitate him, and gave him forgiveness.
He never demanded from the IPC in public to "hey guys, enough of your silence. Liquidate Sen. Legarda's P500,000 and save me from hell."