Point Blank
laquino@theguidon.com

Last school year, I’ve had the privilege of covering the Sanggu General Elections for The GUIDON. I remember how noisy all the candidates were back then, with all their posters and theatrics. I also remember how IBIG-Agila seemed all hyped up to be participating in the elections once again, after having to make do with proxy coalitions for a while due to the previous elections’ moratorium on student parties.

The moratorium, among other things, was meant to overhaul a student party system dominated by pretenders and faux politicos bent on convincing the student body that their ‘political parties’ aren’t actually mere electoral coalitions.

Having said that, I consider the moratorium a failure. I still see no worth in our ‘political parties,’ nor have I begun to think that they are now more relevant in my life. In fact, I haven’t even felt the parties in any significant way since the last elections.

Sure, last school year’s general elections still installed a student government, but that would have been just as true without IBIG-Agila’s eventual domination. However way you look at it, IBIG-Agila and the other pretender parties simply don’t have the makings of genuine political parties to make a government run by them any substantially different from a government run by unaligned independents.

It’s ridiculous how IBIG-Agila tags itself as the “premier political party of the Ateneo” when it’s not even clear where they stand on the most pressing issues of our time.

Maybe IBIG-Agila would like to think that its impressive seat count in the Sanggu right now is already a clear mandate, and that everything’s okay as long as they keep it that way. But let’s make this much clear: a party’s seat count is never a measure of its worth, for genuine political parties function with or without seats. If mere seat count is to be the end-all, be-all of our parties—without any satisfactory effort to substantiate these seats with clear institutional goals—then we could all just as well live without them in our lives.

Allow me to point to one particularly telling sign of this disparaging situation. I distinctly remember how IBIG-Agila revamped its website during the elections last year, and in all fairness they made a good enough site for their ‘party.’ While the site remains operational to this day—still even bannering the party’s campaign posters—a quick scan of it tells us one thing: it hasn’t been updated since the elections.

Here was a ‘party’  that tried to improve its online presence—for better communication with the student body, one would think. All signs, however, point to the site’s immediate abandonment after the elections. It seems then that for IBIG-Agila, the website had already served its purpose as a mere campaign tool; there was no point in updating it afterwards, no point in diligently uploading as much content to the site’s “political stands” or “resolutions” sections as they did for the site’s self-promotion sections.

Which reminds me, the Freshmen and Special Elections happens next month. Perhaps by then, the site would get an update.