Metropolitan Manila Development Authority Bayani Fernando’s answer to criticisms about his posters and billboards teeming on the EDSA highway has been, well, typical Bayani Fernando. Last month, when the criticism grew plentiful and strident, he denied he was campaigning at all. You could see, he said, that in those posters and billboards he looked perfectly serious, even strict. Wait till you saw him smiling, he said. Then you’d know he was campaigning.

I’ve seen those posters and billboards and wondered what in hell they were doing across the length of EDSA. Those are the ones that look not unlike the ad of that movie, “Kung Fu Hustle,” where the “bida” [hero] has his arms crossed, one hand clasping an ax. Fernando has his arms folded across his chest, his face set in a slight frown, while slogans below proclaim that order or discipline (“kaayusan”) is the key to nationhood and progress.

But upping the ante or pushing his luck, he has come out with new posters and billboards that show him to be smiling at the world. Or so a TV news report reports. I haven’t seen them. They have apparently sprouted in Caloocan City, and so far have been confined there. But it’s not hard to imagine how pretty soon they’ll be overrunning Metro Manila, particularly the favorite street of both the angry and the ambitious, which is EDSA.

Fernando probably just thinks he’s cute. Well, it’s time we told him: No, you’re not.

What’s wrong with those posters and billboards?

Does that question have to be asked at all? Whether they show him to be frowning or smiling is neither here nor there. He has no business making them, much less putting them up.

At the very least, that’s so because only last year he was locked in a battle with commercial advertisers and their billboards. At that time, he claimed the billboards were a hazard to motorists and passersby. He tried to tear them down but was halted in his tracks by the courts who issued a preventive suspension on it. Unfazed, he resorted to guerrilla tactics, having his men smear the posters and billboards with black paint. We know that because he himself boasted about it in a TV show, as the lawyers of the aggrieved parties pointed out. Fernando brought his case all the way to the Supreme Court, to no avail.

The shoe is now on the other foot. And the obvious question is why the self-styled scourge of billboards should be given leave to perpetrate the very scourge he professes to rid this world of. That’s not just unethical, that’s hypocritical. The commercial advertisers were at least just advertising products, Fernando is advertising himself. The commercial advertisers were at least just spending their own money to advertise their products; Fernando is spending our money to advertise himself. The commercial advertisers were at least just cooking us in cooking oil, Fernando is cooking us in our own fat.

That brings me to what pisses me off even more about Fernando’s posters and billboards, whether he is smiling or scowling in them. No way can they be excused as public service since their very existence controverts their message. How can you expect the public to observe discipline when you cannot discipline yourself? How can you make public observe order when you goad them to riot just by looking at your face? You want to do public service, put out the message while confining your picture to your wall at home. Indeed, you want to do public service, use the not very minor fortune being lavished on those things to provide bicycle and motorcycle lanes—and so prevent those accidents-waiting-to-happen in Metro Manila’s roads.

Fernando in fact himself controverts his own excuse of public service. He has not been coy about saying he wants to run for president in 2010, saying even now he is the most capable candidate there is. Of course he says as well he will abide by his party’s decision, but clearly he is not the type to let an opportunity pass to swing his party’s decision his way. Hence the posters and billboards. They’re there to make him “presidentiable.” That violates the Penal Code in every respect. The least of it is flouting the ban on campaigning this early. The most of it is using taxpayers’ money to aggrandize himself.

Of course Fernando can always argue that he did not invent this atrocity, others have gone boldly where he dares to tread now. Not the least of them his boss in Malacañang whose PhilHealth cards, courtesy of the current health secretary, who became so as his reward for it, also carried her picture and were distributed right before the 2004 elections. And who to this day continues to flaunt her face at the world in posters and billboards advertising her virtues, which succeeds only in raising the incidence of stress-related diseases in this country from the very sight of it.

Fernando can always say that, but it won’t make him right, it will only make the others just as wrong. That’s like saying when you’re accused of corruption or cheating in elections that other people have stolen before or cheated in elections. If that’s so, then the point is not to find you both innocent, it is to find you both guilty. If Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has all sorts of posters and billboards announcing her good works, then the point is not to allow Fernando to have his own too, the point is to tear Arroyo’s down too. They have no business being there. The money can be put to better use. And you’ll have less heart disease.

Quite simply, Fernando’s posters and billboards break the law. He should be punished with the same resoluteness, or ruthlessness, with which he has punished jaywalkers and illegal vendors for doing so. Those posters and billboards are not cute, they’re criminal.

It’s time we truly had order and discipline. Fernando likes to jaywalk in politics, fence him in too—preferably in the national penitentiary in Muntinlupa.