Maybe it’s just road rage from all the traffic that I’ve been going through lately, whether driving my (borrowed) car, riding a cab, or being a bus passenger myself, but I have always wondered: why the hell do we wonder why there’s so much traffic in EDSA, when an average of 40% of the road cannot be used by 80% of the vehicles?

You know what I’m talking about; it’s the dreaded yellow lanes in EDSA, wherein buses and jeepneys are free to ply in and out of, but once private vehicles and, more recently, taxi cabs, enter the MMDA boys come swooping down on you like pet vultures of The Great Pink BF.

Of course, nobody really questions the law because, hell, private vehicle owners? They’re rich! If they can afford a car, they should be able to afford a ticket from the MMDA! Unlike those poor bus drivers who can swerve in and out of them yellow lanes because — hey, it’s their job — and they have every right to cut into your lane because they’re "less fortunate" than you with your spanking brand new Chery QQ.

So, let’s review the kinds of laws Filipinos have written against the "more fortunate" because it’s just "rightful" for them and they give just advantage to the "less fortunate":

Yellow Lanes

Seriously, it’s impossible to find what the whole point of this godforsaken law, and the way the MMDA boys have twisted it the other way around — theoretically private vehicles should be allowed in the yellow lanes because, heaven forbid, the sidewalks and establishments are deep inside them! Why private vehicles are treated like UN forces crossing the 38th parallel towards Pyongyang, I still don’t understand.

Never mind if almost half of EDSA is unusable — creating enormous traffic jams on an already overloaded highway — for which the apparent remedy is U-turn slots and pink urinals. It ensures that those who cannot afford their own cars and the "less fortunate" bus and jeepney drivers ferrying them have a free hand in doing whatever they want as long as they’re in these beautiful golden stretches.

Taxes on books and electronics

Why is everyone making a hoot against this "great book blockade" thing? It’s meant to keep you rich kids from getting your unnecessarily expensive copies of Twilight! Save that for the beggar outside your campus gate instead!

And if you think this is the first time the government did it… na ah ah. Seriously, did you ever wonder why those laptops, digital cameras, cellphones, and other uber-gadgets are just oh so cheap in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan? It’s because the Philippines places high taxes on these dreaded devices! Dreaded, because everyone knows that only the uber rich can buy uber gadgets and henceforth they must be taxed! Never mind if everyone needs a cellphone these days, never mind if laptop computers actually empower the downtrodden by allowing access to the internet and therefore free flowing information, and never mind if digital cameras allow people to get rid of film cameras which, with the hazardous chemical content of both the manufacture of film and processing and development, leads to various forms of pollution. Never mind, never mind.

The Lina Law

The mother of all "social justice" laws, the Urban Development and Housing Act of 1992 (RA 7279) [PDF] colloquially called the Lina Law "lays down the groundwork for a comprehensive and continuing urban development and housing program" and "addresses the right to housing of the homeless and underprivileged Filipino people." Quite a noble law, seeking to allow the "less fortunate" a level playing field at finding homes.

Of course, a lot of unscrupulous-though-less-fortunate people also use it to steal land; while the dramatized cinematic representation is of some cruel Doña riding a Mercedes ordering goons to beat the crap out of poor laborers arms linked with wives and kids tearfully crying while the bulldozer comes in, many times hardworking OFWs, scrimping on meals to save for their dream house, come home with the lots they bought in the last seafaring-tour-of-duty occupied by gin-drinking merry men. These "less fortunate" persons then brandish the Lina Law being on their side, drawing the "rich" OFW’s savings into attorney’s fees in a court battle to get the land he actually really owns.

Who should benefit from our laws?

While there are laws that benefit the downtrodden that are commendable and praiseworthy, the cliche must once again be evoked: the road to hell is paved, gold plated, and vacuum sealed fresh with good intentions. Any law that tips the balance from one sector of society to the other must have easy-to-invoke stop gaps that disallow the law to be abused by the benefiting sector, or render them moot when the needs addressed by the law have become irrelevant.

Only when the law benefits everyone, not just the downtrodden, can a society be really called just and equal.

While seeing a car burn to the ground is shocking enough for most people, a Ferrari F430 is worth a staggering 12 million pesos, sans excise tax, which goes at 100% the car’s value. If you’ve watched the video, you have just seen 24 million pesos burn to the ground.

The reactions when this first came out are varied, mostly to the tune of “sayang yung Ferrari”. Others can’t help but remember this funny Fita biscuit commercial of the “red sports car”:

However when the video initially came out on YouTube there were those who commented that it “serves the car owner right” for being “mayabang” in owning such a luxurious car in a third world country like the Philippines. Others simply say that the owner has “nowhere to put his money” (“walang mapag-lagyan ng pera”) so he wasted it on a Ferrari considering Manila’s potholed roads. Still others lamented the “insensitivity” of the car owner considering there are people in the country who cannot eat three times a day. There are those who assumed that the driver was “showing off”, leading to an engine overheat that caused the fire (apparently the overheat problem is specific to the Ferrari F430 and there have been cases of other F430s burning in several places around the world). Too bad the comments have been deleted by the video owner.

It is not difficult to agree with those who berated the owner of the Ferrari. With poverty staring us Filipinos on the face each and everyday, how can we be so insensitive as to even dare own, much less drive, a 24 million peso car? He should be ashamed of himself for owning such an expensive car, right? But let’s shed our Toyota-driving middle class shoes and put ourselves in the place of the really really poor.

Torn and Frayed, in an entry last year, tells of a friend (who used to blog but put the blog down, unfortunately) whose driver dared ask how much coffee from Starbucks costs:

My part-time driver put me to shame last week. I asked him to drop me off at Starbucks on UN Avenue in Manila. He asked, out of curiosity:

– How much is a coffee at Starbucks?

I tried to remember. I had actually never paid it much attention till now. I answered with my best guess:

– Around, I think, 60 or 65 pesos (US$ 1.25)

He was clearly shocked. He exclaimed aloud and was visibly upset for a moment. We spoke no more about it. We were both embarrassed, he at having so obviously shown surprise and disapproval, I at what I saw as my extravagance in his eyes. Later, I was even more embarrassed when I discovered that my guess for the price was way below the real cost: 80 pesos for a single shot (around USD 1.57). [Torn and Frayed]

It’s very easy for us to sneer at those who can afford what we can’t, and it’s very easy for us to condemn them for “burning” so much money in a country like the Philippines. But I wonder how many of us will be willing to give up our daily 100+ peso Starbucks fix? Or that 300 peso lazy-boy movie at Gateway? Or that 800+ peso dinner at Italianni’s? Or that 1000+ peso monthly out of town at Tagaytay? To the white collar middle class Filipino, these are luxuries that they have earned the right to enjoy because they worked for it, and they worked hard. Nobody has the right to tell them how they should spend the money they earned.

But what about the owner of the Ferrari? Didn’t he work hard for and earn the right to enjoy uber-expensive cars too? Can anybody dictate what kind of car they should drive, and at what cost a car should be deemed us “too expensive” to dare own in this country?

Truth to be told, it all boils down to our attitude towards money. If we see money as a finite resource that’s very hard to come by, like the poor and most of the middle class do, it’s very easy for us to condemn those who can afford to splurge simply because we cannot do what they are doing. What’s worse, some of us will go as far as assuming that it’s very likely that the rich person in question is doing something “bad” and that’s the reason they are earning so much money. Just listen to how the Kilusang Mayo Uno and other leftists condemn business owners as abusers and extortionists, and you’ll realize the attitude the poor has towards the rich.

The bottomline would still be how we view money, and whether we see it as something that is “finite” and “evil”. Besides, money is the root of all evil, isn’t it?

No.

Love of money is the root of all evil?

Wrong again!

Bo Sanchez, in 8 Secrets of the Truly Rich, posits that it’s the lack of money that is the root of all evil. I agree with him. All the negative attitudes we have towards having so much money (at least enough afford a Ferrari) is associated with how finite (and therefore, lacking) money is.

We have no right to question rich people how they spend their money in as much as nobody has the right to question us how we spend our money. But we do have the responsibility to ask ourselves how well we spend our money, and if, after all has been spent and done, we have spent it meaningfully or “burnt” it on overly-expensive espresso fixes.

That’s something you and only you can figure out.

Regulations affecting 10 stages of a business life are measured from the perspective of the entrepreneur. The stages are: Starting a business, dealing with licenses, employing workers, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and closing a business.

According to the survey, the Philippines is lagging behind other Asian markets, including India (120th) and China (83th) whose phenomenal growth has made Asia the fastest growing region in the world. [Inquirer.net]

Any local businessman would affirm the findings of the study; the plethora of requirements and paperwork and the inefficiency of the bureaucracy will squeeze too much available capital and occupy too long a time that many entrepreneurs, including budding ones, consider quitting before day one.

It appears though, that it is even worse when one decides to close a business:

The Philippines scored most poorly in the criterion on closing a business, where it ranked 147th. The country was cited as one of the least efficient places in the world to handle a bankruptcy.

In starting a business, the Philippines ranks 144th, well in the bottom third.

The country also lags in the protection of investors (ranked 141th), ease of employing workers (122nd), paying taxes (126th) and enforcing a contract (113th).

The survey also showed that it takes 195 hours a year and 47 procedural steps to pay taxes here. The total tax rate is at a hefty 52.8 percent. [Inquirer.net]

If only to add insult to injury, a separate article from the same paper talks about the study of a University of Maryland professor which says that our economic malaise is part of a cultural heritage:

Some 330 years of Spanish rule had influenced the Philippines greatly, an impact that survived nearly 50 years of later colonial occupation by the US, the study by Robert Nelson of the University of Maryland said.

This Spanish Catholic influence, in contrast to the US Protestant model, had led to a “dominant political role” by large landholding families in the Philippines just like in Latin America, Nelson said.

A weak government and powerful political oligarchies combined to put the state in the service of private interests, he added.

“If culture is now to be considered an important economic influence, it may be that this common Spanish Catholic heritage is a main contributing factor in the economic histories of the Philippines and most of Latin America,” the study said. [Inquirer.net]

At best, Nelson’s study appears to be confirming something that we’ve already known — ever wonder why Spanish colonies appear to have all become third world countries? While I find it downright xenophobic and preposterous to continue laying blame on colonization — it’s all too long ago, really — it’s likewise important to underscore the fact that long after they’re gone we are still running along the circles that they drew on the ground for us to follow to be well on the path to “civilization”.

Lest this post becomes yet another ramble of the Philippine situation, which I abhor but occasionally do anyway, I will instead ask — is there any correlation between our culture and the difficulty in opening a new business?

Let’s start with some prevalent misconceptions. For example, some people would find the two studies contradictory. The first study shows businesses as being victims of an inefficient bureaucracy, while the second study points to corruption as serving mere private interests. The contradictions exist if people equivocate businesses with private interests, and see no difference between the rich, the business owners, and the oligarchs. If the prevalent culture benefits private interests, doesn’t that mean businesses have it easy?

The clear answer is no — businesses stand to loose a lot of money to corruption because of people who belong in cultures that make sweeping generalizations such as “all entrepreneurs must be rich”. In fact, when my father and aunt set up their sari-sari store some time ago, he made sure it was my aunt’s name that is used in the official documents. The reason for this is because we have a Chinese surname, which always attracts the pencil-pushing vultures. If you’re Chinese, you must have a deep pocket — and thus, you must have a lot of money to spare to their under-the-table antics.

We’re lucky that my wife didn’t experience this when she was setting up our travel agency, despite the surname. Have things changed for the better? Hopefully.

But the real contradiction lies in the fact that the under-the-table vultures at the city hall are not political oligarchs. They are in fact, poor government employees with meager salaries. The same goes for the corrupt policeman, the corrupt fireman, the corrupt soldier, the corrupt baranggay official, ad infinitum. The same people who are “victims” of economic injustice and the great divide between the rich and poor are the same people perpetuating the practices that doom them to such “injustices”.

This of course, is not to say that corrupt political oligarchs don’t exist — I just want to say that anybody, and that means anybody, even the very victims of a corrupt system, can choose to be corrupt when given the opportunity.

Going back to the perceptions of entrepreneurs as being rich and entrepreneurship as something exclusive to the rich, I find that ironic as well. I find the belief that Filipinos not being innately entrepreneurial as untrue — you will find a potential entrepreneur within every vendor, sari-sari store and carinderia owner, and tricycle driver out in the street. It’s just that these small-time entrepreneurs aren’t informed and educated enough to dream and think big, or do not band and help each other become better entrepreneurs, and bureaucratic hurdles like exorbitant fees and corruption only serves to sap that potential.

Unfortunately the sapping effect of entrepreneurship only tends to enforce the misconceptions that only people with deep pockets can legitimize their businesses. Which leads to lowly public servants believing they could easily earn from those people, and so on and so forth. Sad to say that the Filipino bias against entrepreneurship appears to be too deeply entrenched in our own culture.

Perhaps what “ordinary” people, especially those stuck in the “study hard–be a good employee–be promoted–retire with benefits” mindset do not understand is that business is also a public interest. In fact, we tend to demonize business owners as profit-hungry capitalists who care for nothing but money. What we do not understand is that we need them — in as much as they need us, as Jego shares in a comment in Expectorants.

Once when I was working with an NGO (we worked in coastal communities, teaching them how to gather and use information, especially on their resources), I sat down in front of the TV with some of my colleagues and we were watching a Speedo fashion show on TV. Of course, being young NGO-type guys, we sniggered at the fashion industry, thinking they were superficial, good-for-nothings.

Then as I was watching some babe parade in a swimsuit, I told my colleagues, “What have we accomplished? We come up with resource assessments and recommendations and feasibility studies, and we hand it over to the local government who’ll just probably sit on it or thrust it in a drawer til it gets eaten by mold and mildew, while these fashion models parading on the catwalk are selling clothes and might be creating jobs for the very people we want to help. I think they’re doing more for them than we are.”

My colleagues just nodded their heads. They didn’t have to say anything. [Jego in Expectorants]

Businessmen are citizens and part of the public too — and their businesses provide the very jobs many of us are dependent upon, even if they make products only Paris Hilton fans can ever appreciate. If we want to reverse the migration of skilled labor outside our country — if we want to stop the brain drain and turn it into brain gain, we must do anything and everything to shift the bias towards entrepreneurship.

If that bias is successfully changed, then maybe that’s the only time that enough people can apply political pressure to make legitimate businesses easier to set up.

Well, she’s really back. To underscore the irony, part of what she writes is about why women should not be afraid to try out cheap make-up brands:

But don’t be a label whore when it comes to makeup because as I said all the chemicals are basically the same. Don’t be afraid to try out cheap drugstore brands. You may find some things that you actually like. And for those of you on a budget don’t feel bad if you’re buying a cheaper brand than the one you really want. They just differ in packaging anyway, it’s all the same. [MST]

I guess it’s not the same with perfume? Beats me.

Anyway, I hope people will not vehemently react to her continued writing on MST. I believe that the only way that we can see if she was indeed sincere with her resignation apology, and if she has indeed learned something from the incident, is to read what she writes about in the future.

Everyone deserves a second chance, and everybody has a right to their own opinion. If the online community remains civil to this decision by the MST, I believe that we could prove that there is no truth to the accusation that the Philippine blogosphere is a lynch mob. We could also prove that we could be a more mature blogging community to begin with.

Now if you really want to beautify and lose weight:

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After I managed to calm down, I think I inadvertently put on “paper” a lot of my sentiments on the current political situation, and why I think that we should rather discuss on solutions that we as a citizenry can carry out. Here is the body of one of my saner, more sensible emails:

Hi Chimi,

I’m sorry if you feel misconstrued; and I know that it is very very important that we tackle the core problems to be able to find the solutions. I am also sorry if someone starts to think that I am against the concept of people going out of the country to become OFWs. I will explain:

On discussing problems

My beef with regards to discussing the problems is that that’s all we ever do — discuss problems. Open the newspaper — any newspaper, read the opinion section.

Day in day out for the past decade and a half of my 27 years alive (I’ve started reading newspapers daily as an adolescent… with my father ranting in the background) all I’ve ever read about are problems and problems and the problem with this and the problem with that. Most of them are critical, comprehensive, and well-researched. Well-analyzed.

However they all contain one flaw : all the solutions they present rely on the government, which, unfortunately, almost always means that the solutions are neither implemented nor heeded.

And of course the analyses continue. Day in and day out more and more analysis from pundits and columnists and all I ever see are problems. They have a name for this phenomenon: analysis paralysis.

Meanwhile, the entrepreneurs that I mentioned (in a previous email, I mentioned Henry Sy, John Gokongwei and Socorro Ramos, all of who didn’t finish college but managed to become multi-millionaires) just kept on working harder and harder, and thus getting richer and richer. It was almost as if they were immune to the problems of the nation, but they are not. It was as if they were apathetic to the problems of the country, but they aren’t. They’re just too busy earning money, improving their businesses, and creating more jobs.

So I am not saying that we ignore the problems. What I am saying is that we already know the problems. It’s time to ask what can we do about them? Or to be more specific, what can we do with our lives so that despite these problems we would be protected from their adverse effects?

On OFWs

I’m sure all of us know the importance of the OFW to our current economy. The Balance of Payments surplus we are enjoying is due largely to the dollars that are flowing in to the country. But just like the 60s, we should not rest on our laurels and treat it as a permanent solution. The long-term social and economic costs ( e.g., the separation of families, the brain drain) of sending workers overseas are too great and will damage us in the long run.

So how will we offset the necessity to earn abroad? By encouraging OFWs to become entrepreneurs as well. This is viable because they earn enough savings to put up their own businesses, and necessary out of the need to continue earning money during their retirement years.

On entrepreneurship

Now you might ask why the over-emphasis on entrepreneurship? That’s because entrepreneurship generates jobs — and if enough people become entrepreneurs then those who do not have the ability to be so or those who are still learning about it can be employed by them. And if there are enough jobs, the requirement for UP, Ateneo, or DLSU grads will start being considered absurd because these universities can only churn out so much graduates in a given year.

Fortunately even in the current situation there are industries that have stopped giving a premium on the Big 3 graduates because they have become both expensive and scarce. I will admit that I did not face this problem (I graduated from DLSU) but many of my best colleagues (I’m in the IT industry) come from a plethora of universities both belittled and unknown: AMA, STI, Bicol University, Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila to name a few. They are very good (most are admittedly better than myself) and the IT industry simply cannot afford to ignore them because of the ongoing brain drain, with many of these guys gone forever to Singapore.

It’s hard.. but I choose to stay here. I believe my fight is here. Praise the Lord, however, that I am provided with larger than usual earnings because of my profession. At the moment I’m still employed as an IT professional, but my wife is running a home-based travel agency business by which we hope to learn the ropes of entrepreneurship.

There have been opportunities to work in Singapore as well, and it’s hard to resist, but I believe that what we are doing is for the best. When the time comes hopefully I could put up my own IT-related/empowered business (or expand our travel agency business towards that direction) to be able to educate and later employ impoverished-but-deserving countrymen, out of my own earnings and effort.

This is the way that I believe I can help in pushing this country forward, and I hope some, if not many of you, will join me with my dream.

I apologize for the length of this response, and the tone of my previous mail. I hope I have not offended anyone.

God bless,
-Jonjon

The youngster’s dad, 45-year-old Alex Hell, has expressed outrage after the primary school in the southern city of Melbourne allegedly refused to admit his son, Max.

“We are victims of our name,” said Hell, whose name is of Austrian origin.

“We’re quite devastated by the whole thing,” the Catholic father of three told the Australian Associated Press.

“It’s 2007, not 1407 — it’s not the Dark Ages.”[AFP via Inquirer.net]

So I was mistaken in my previous post — it’s not fundamentalist Christians: it’s Catholic bigots.

In an age of religious tolerance and moderation, it is unfortunate that some conservatives feel threatened enough to lash out at just about anything to “preserve the integrity of their religion.” Whatever integrity that is however is eroded by irresponsible policies — something rampant in Catholic schools.

In some local Catholic schools, for example, illegitimate children or children of single parents aren’t accepted on that basis. As if the child had a choice in the matter.

When will these so called “Christians” start practicing the real message of their God that they supposedly preach? Jesus was supposed to have taught understanding, forgiveness and compassion, not narrow-minded bigotry as exhibited above.

Great read, especially since it comes from sparks, who isn’t only more adept at cultural analysis as I am (it’s her job), but also happens to work part time for a company that operates a dating website in Australia. Plus the fact that she’s a Filipina, and is directly affected by this issue.

And I loooove the way she expounded on the collective low self-esteem of Filipinos.

Thanks sparks.

The outpouring of support in the subsequent comments not only showed people approving of the contextual use of the word “sexy” on her blog; her son BA argued that his mother’s blog is redefining the word sexy vis-a-vis the image of a Filipina by using it in a very wholesome manner.

I wonder where such narrow-minded bigots who give little emphasis to context come from?

On the other side of the globe, Simon Jones describes how his blog got an NC-17 rating, and an unusual trend where the word “hell” is treated as a dirty word.

I especially find the bit on “hell” as amusing. In traditional Judeo-Christian tradition, hell is where the evil and the damned are banished. I wonder if the parents Simon talked about where Jews or Christians, and what word they actually use to describe hell. “That place of eternal damnation that must not be named” perhaps?

I’m also curious on the semantics of the reasoning behind this trend. Do they believe that merely uttering “hell” would bring a child there? Are they trying to avoid them picking up “go to hell!” expression? Is uttering the word an invocation of the devil? Did the Bible suddenly sprout a verse that says that saying “hell” does not please God?

Or is it just another case of extremist overzealous Christianity?

Both of these remind me of my post asking why Tagalog words pertaining to sexuality were considered dirty vis-a-vis their English counterparts.

One topic led to another until we hit a particularly meaty issue in their office.

“Do you know the easiest way to get promoted in the office, especially for girls?” she asked.

A resounding “what?” fired off of my head, eagerly waiting for the answer, sort of having a clue.

“Flirt with the white guys” — the white guys either being executives of their own company, or more commonly, client representatives. For those not familiar with call center operations, client representatives are representatives from the company that the call center serves; usually they hold supervisorial and training positions and are in charge of recommending the best performing agents for their promotion.

“Oh Peter, you look so good today!” our friend went, mimicking a loose-sounding slut, and laughter roared out at our table.

She then goes on to tell of a case wherein a client representative’s actions became suspicious after consistently filing recommendations of promotion for a particular female agent. Her suspicions were confirmed when, over a similar drinking session with her fellow supervisors (she has a managerial position in the company) the client representative admitted to her, in drunken stupor, that he has fallen in love with the agent.

His termination process was immediately started the following day.

“Foreigners love it here because they feel like kings” she continued. “Lots of Filipinas flirt with them, ripe for their picking.”

I couldn’t disagree myself — aside from the Daniel Smith vs. Nicole issue wherein Nicole did place herself in the presence of white guys regardless of whether what happened after was rape or consensual sex, I personally saw what she was talking about. Not with a white guy, but with an American born-and-bred cousin of mine.

The girls from the local church group (his aunt with which he stayed is active there) were all over him his whole stay. The way they swarmed around him (complete with, errr, flirty giggles) were tantamount to asking him to go ahead and fuck them in exchange for a “good life” in the US. My cousin eventually married a Filipina from here, but not someone who flirted with him, and that’s an entirely different story.

“One VP even told me that the Philippines was an open pussy country. I wanted to defend us Filipinas, but I couldn’t really do it because deep inside of me, I know it’s true”, and our friend brought across a message that hit hard. Real hard.

While it isn’t necessarily true for all Filipinas, and I personally know a lot of foreigner-Filipina relationships that were borne out of true love and friendship, it doesn’t help either that many Filipinas do in fact loosen up too much when around men from western countries. Problem is, this perception erodes the credibility of those with genuine relationships. In some countries, Filipina wives are sometimes looked upon as mail-order brides, while some local Filipinas, envious on another for “catching” a white guy, often asks the latter to hook her up with the guy’s friends.

I’ve once read of a Filipina got really irritated when, in trips to the province, people ask her from which chat room she met her boyfriend, a German national. She met him from work, but whenever she gives that answer, some would insist on knowing if he met him from Yahoo! or MSN.

The nasty perceptions of foreigners notwithstanding, this issue reminds me of a very real and deep problem that Filipinos still face: a very deep insecurity compounded by the lack of pride in being Filipino or love for the country and our countrymen, plus the propensity to worship foreigners (especially Caucasians) that is deeply rooted in the Filipino psyche. I certainly don’t think any country whose citizens possess exactly that kind of psyche can progress to any significant degree.

With our drinks slowly running out, the “meatiness” of our conversation shifted into higher gear, with our friend turning it to the numerous sex video/pics scandals that plague the night-shifted BPO industry. But that’s for another post.

UPDATE: Thanks to Micheal for pointing out Cathy’s blog entry on her experiences on the issue.

After yet another political assasination there, even after the elections are over, I can’t help but think: with the bulk of election violence coming from that province, hasn’t it had enough? It should be put under military rule. Or each and every politician there should be house-arrested/incommunicado during the run-up to the next campaign period to prevent them contacting their assassins and private armies.

Its politicians are the most vicious and spineless (dickless?) that I have ever heard of, and the lack of progress in that province only goes to show that all those deaths mean absolutely nothing.

The place has spilt enough blood. Abolish it now!