The Metropolitan Mulcting and ‘Dilihensiya’ Authority

Apply the word association test that psychologists administer to check and discover for latent, albeit hidden, relationships underlying thoughts and simply ask what quickly comes to mind when the letters M-M-D-A are mentioned. 

Very near the top of everyone’s mind, if not the most popular answer, is the Pilipino slang “dilihensiya” the closest translation of the word “mulcting.” Within the same cluster of synonyms would probably be words like “entrapment,” “extortion” and “bribery.”

The impromptu results are not surprising. They convincingly found the public perception labeled on the development authority tasked to manage the country’s most congested metropolis whose personnel, for the most part, are exemplified by traffic enforcers manning street corners.

The imagery associated slightly varies depending on the constituency that either endures or outrightly suffers their presence.

For street vendors and fruit and vegetable sellers who unlawfully expropriated whole sidewalks and a good portion of our roads turning these into personal commercial marketplaces, the agency is that which had once too often drenched flammable kerosene on their goods and thereafter threatened to torch these.

For vendors who survived the draconian and cruel kerosene assault, the agency is seen as that which confiscated their commercial foodstuff, quickly loaded these unto trucks, sped off almost like thieves in broad daylight, darting into unseen corners toward destinations unknown, there forever disappearing. No inventories are taken. No receipts are handed over.

For those eking out a subsistence living through illegal food stalls, eateries, car-wash establishments, vulcanizing shops, repair shops, unregulated and makeshift slaughter houses occupying both curbs and at least one lane of a public road, the agency represents an unofficial taxing authority collecting revenues in addition to the legal tax obligations owed by legitimate curbside businesses.

For these constituencies, the word-association test invariably results in the Filipino colloquial term for “mulcting”. While the word “dilihensiya” has an altogether different definition in English, over decades of misapropos, it now evokes such negativity that often crosses over to criminality.

Fines paid to any unauthorized entity are illegal. So are soliciting and paying bribes. More when the entity exercising police powers usurp. The same illegality applies where public transport drivers pay for tumblers of cold water transacted by dubious assets of traffic enforcers in exchange for illegally loading and unloading commuters at any point whims and wiles please them.

For the public-utility driver, the agency is perhaps represented by at least five traffic enforcers milling around a four-corner intersection where the number of enforcers serves as an arithmetic divisor for money collected on-demand and on-site prosecuted under an informal system designed to incentivize and compensate first and foremost, and perhaps, only where applicable, by chance to enforce traffic order as well.

Here the primary objective is fund raising much like the proposed virtual “exemptions-for-sale” scheme that targets moneyed motorists who pay for the privilege to be above the law.

The government should not be in the business of selling virtual “get-out-of-jail” cards that puts a price tag on criminality. When the state engages in such avarice. it perpetuates economic inequities and institutionalizes legal bribery through social bias, effectively declaring that violations can be bought, marketed by an agency with a warped sense of law enforcement.

Who is the brilliant brainiac within the bureaucracy who cooks up these harebrained methods that foment petty corruption and inflict profound harm in the guise of order?

Remember those filthy and stinking health hazards posing as male urinals sans any kind of plumbing that they constructed all over the metropolis? Remember the pink painted lines drawn over sidewalks to demarcate between the public and private property that enabled enforcers to collect fines to augment their legal compensation? Remember the fleet of flatbed trucks with metal drums filled with dirty water, which enforcers armed with towel-sized rags used to drench commuters with?

Some years back, a concrete island right in the middle of the Guadalupe Bridge was being transformed into a provincial bus terminal. Today under the crisscrossing flyovers at the intersection of Edsa and Ortigas Avenue there is a bus terminal that commuters access by dangerously darting across several lanes despite signages that admonish against jaywalking. Farther north at Quezon Boulevard an elevated pedestrian crosswalk ends prematurely atop a busy intersection thus forcing pedestrians to climb down on to center islands rather than on sidewalks.

Today this agency is mulling over a ludicrous traffic scheme along Edsa guaranteed to earn extra money for its enforcers as regulations flip over, alternate and change several times within a few hours. It is a truism that corruption is created by a chemistry of incompetence and the deliberate obfuscation of protocols that enable subjective enforcement of the law.

Well, here we go again.