Through the many weeks of challenging coverages regarding student government issues, the Weekly Sillimanian (tWS) staff has always been wondering about trends that ideally should not happen often.
It is disturbing to observe that some Silliman University Student Government (SUSG) representatives think that the student body does not care to know the reason behind some changes in the student government. One example is the sudden resignation of former Speaker of the House Rep. Ebenezer Manzano from the College of Law, who was replaced by Rep. Kimberly Flores from the College of Arts and Sciences. In a text message, Rep. Ebenezer said that he “doesn’t want to comment on the change anymore, since it happened last year.”
The bigger picture shows that that these student politicians would wait until they tell each other (specifically to their co-member who comes from another political party) their grievances to each other is cringe-worthy. The staff probably feels this way because editors won’t wait for the day of post mortem to tell its writers what’s wrong with their outputs, behavior, or work ethics.
If not on formal meetings, they would hit each other subtly thru Facebook status and photos with quotations. Even tWS is subjected to comments of intimidation coming from political party “elders,” who claim to be only “eating popcorn” with the fast turn of events. Even if they are heavily-involved in all political agenda and planning for the upcoming 2016 SUSG elections, they cannot clip each other’s shoulders and communicate properly.
If the SUSG officials cannot be transparent and accountable to each other, then they cannot blame the student body for not seeing that transparency and accountability in motion. More alarms should go off when the gap between the two political parties is evident.
At least there are people from the student government who would admit mistakes and not hinder the school paper from publishing all kinds of truth, even if the move would taint names.
tWS promises to inform the student body about SG operations and issues. But we want to apologize early on behalf of those officers who turn every message from being seenzoned to unread-zoned.~
