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[av_heading heading=’PEOPLE POWWOW | Tobing Javier, commissioner from Antique’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY HERBERT VEGO
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Tuesday, June 27, 2017
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“WHAT the human mind can conceive and believe, the human mind can achieve.”
This familiar quote from book author Napoleon Hill reminds one of the newly-appointed deputy commissioner of the Bureau of Immigration (BI), Tobias M. Javier, who literally aspired for that post way back in 2001 or 16 years ago!
I remember that day in 2001 when I dropped by his law office at SM City-Manila. By then, he had gained recognition as an immigration lawyer and hearing officer at BI. He confided to me his wish to be appointed associate commissioner. He could not have known then that the fulfillment of his dream would unfold 16 long years later.
But as it turned out by a fluke of fate in April this year, President Rodrigo Duterte appointed Javier BI deputy commissioner, replacing Al Argosino, one of the two sacked deputy commissioners who had allegedly extorted P50 million from gambling tycoon Jack Lam.
Javier now realizes that his failure to gain the aspired job in 2001 was a blessing in disguise. It impelled him to shift his attention to public service. And so he met with his fellow Metro Manila-based professionals from the province of Antique to organize the Antique Foundation International, Inc. (AFII). Among the foundation’s eight objectives, foremost were to alleviate the plight of poor Antiqueños and to extend whatever assistance to victims of calamities and diseases.
There was a time when a 26-year-old indigent mother – Mary Grace Claud of Catunggan, Sibalom, Antique – had to give birth to Siamese twins. AFII shouldered the cost. Unfortunately, the twins died before they could be surgically separated.
Because of his philanthropic nature, his friends and relatives would often badger Tobing to try his luck in politics. This set him into asking himself, “Why not?”
At that time, his father Jose was still mayor of Hamtik. Indeed, he had descended from a family of politicians. His late grandfather, Pedro Javier, had been mayor of Hamtik in the early post-war era. He is a nephew of the late governor Evelio Javier and former congressman Exequiel Javier. His cousin Paolo is Antique’s incumbent congressman.
In the year 1986, Tobing met with this writer in Tokyo Tokyo (a restaurant at SM City-Manila) as regards his decision to run for Antique’s Sangguniang Panlalawigan the following year.
He ran and won three times, covering three terms (2007 to 2016). Today he looks back to that period as his most challenging years. It was he who filed criminal and administrative charges at the Office of the Ombudsman against then Antique governor Salvacion Perez and the Antique Development Foundation for having benefited from the Joc-joc Bolante P728-million fertilizer fund scandal. In fairness to the accused, however, the Sandiganbayan has acquitted them.
To Javier, 49, his new job at BI is another feather added to his legal cap. Incidentally, he finished Law at the Ateneo de Manila University School of Law and passed the 1984 bar with a rating of 85.20 percent.
He is also an incorporator at DJA Security Services, which provides security guards to various branches of SM City in Metro Manila.
There’s a story as to how he got the name Tobias. On Sept. 6, 1968, his mother – Encarnacion Magbanua Javier, a school teacher – was visiting the municipality of Dao when she found it necessary to give birth to her first child in the town’s hospital. She immediately thought of naming the boy after Dao’s most distinguished native, the late congressman Tobias Fornier. (Dao has been renamed Tobias Fornier.)
A second cousin of mine, the former Aireen Vego Escanillas, is lucky to have bewitched him into matrimony and given birth to their three children: Janine, Jianne Jaena and Jose Tobias. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
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