THE EASIEST way to describe Zamora is that he is a congressional abnormality. He spent a paltry P450,000 for his congressional campaign, when his colleagues shelled out anywhere from P10 million to 15 million each. (But then, his opponent was a human rights lawyer, who probably didn’t spend much either.) Zamora is ill at ease in a business suit or a barong Tagalog, which he says makes him feel like he just climbed out of a coffin. He prefers to take a three-day drive or an overnight boat ride from Manila to Mindanao than spend his money on plane fare. He has never taken a trip abroad at the expense of the House, having turned down such offers more than once, including the business-class ticket and $300-per diem.

	Zamora is ill at ease in a business suit or a barong Tagalog as it makes him feel like he just climbed out of a coffin. [photo courtesy of Ben Razon]

He does not attend sessions that often, though he appears at committee hearings where arguments for or against a bill need to be heard. His net worth did shoot up after his second year in office, like those of many of his colleagues. But he says that was because during his first year, he had neglected to declare among his assets some P1 million worth of his seedlings in his nursery back in Compostela Valley.

Even at the House, he spends much of his time tending to his plants. Zamora actually performs a service for Congress by managing his nursery, a small plot of land he got from Speaker Jose de Venecia in lieu of a foreign trip. The plot has been transformed into a zero-waste zone, where trash is either recycled or turned into fertilizer. He has space here for compost pits, which make good use of all the garbage coming out of the House, literally speaking. Each day, his staff collects the leftover food from the House canteens, which he then uses to make fertilizer. The nursery has so far produced some 3,000 seedlings, which he has given away to fellow congressmen and House staff.

This is as close as he could get to a farm, which is where he says he would rather be. He had a desk and a phone installed in a portion of the nursery right next to the Batasan perimeter fence and conducts most of his legislative work above the din of passing vehicles. He has a regular office somewhere in the House building, but he says it leaves him “feeling executive” so he rarely goes there. So far this year, he has set foot in that office only twice.

To Zamora, legislative work in large part means attending to his constituents’ needs. At his Northview home, he provides board and lodging to visiting constituents who have nowhere to stay in the capital. Since July 2001, he has had hundreds of guests, the latest of them 38 students headed for Clark and 96 women constituents on their way to Baguio.

And then there are the numerous requests, financial and otherwise. One day he could be entertaining calls from a Chinese-Filipino seeking his help in retrieving a passport confiscated by the Bureau of Immigration. Or, he and his chief of staff could be burning the phone lines, scrounging for additional funds to ship home the body of a constituent who recently expired at the Heart Center.

What Zamora is truly known for, and what even his colleagues acknowledge, is the service he provides sick or dying constituents, something he had done even during his nine years as provincial board member. He earned the nickname Way Kurat because he has no qualms about fetching wounded rebels from their lairs and taking them to doctors or hospitals, or driving the dead to funeral parlors. Throughout his political career, he counts more than 1,000 such trips. He has a credit line to two funeral parlors in Compostela Valley for those who cannot afford caskets or wakes. And he doesn’t hesitate peeling off the plywood in his house walls for those who need coffins, much to his wife’s dismay.

The P65 million Zamora gets yearly as his share of the PDAF (Priority Development Assistance Fund) goes to building multipurpose halls, farm-to-market roads, deep wells — the usual projects a congressman funds. Being a member of the ruling party also gives him access to the president’s social fund, where he gets more money to build roads. But Zamora’s constituents can be anyone, and their needs anything under the sun. He gives money to build quarters for soldiers assigned to his district. At the same time, he also sends medicines to rebels recuperating from wounds. He even gets text messages from them asking him for cellphone “loads,” something he readily accedes to, since being connected to them keeps him in touch when he needs information.

Zamora, however, has his own padrino: no less than his immediate predecessor in the House, Lorenzo Sarmiento, the political kingpin of Compostela Valley. Apparently, it was Sarmiento who decided that Zamora should take his place in Congress. Sarmiento, who had already been congressman for the maximum three terms, at first wanted Zamora to run for governor. But, as Zamora recalls, the veteran politico changed his mind and thought it better to have his wife as governor and Zamora as congressman. Aside from Sarmiento’s Congress post, Zamora also inherited his padrino’s chief of staff.

This is tired old patronage politics with many twists. And among the twists is that Way Kurat is no Juan de la Cruz but a shrewd lumpen who has landed in a Congress where a lawmaker really doesn’t spend most of his time making laws. Today legislators focus their energies on pork-barrel projects. Revisiting ancient laws and scrutinizing how the executive performs its functions are just minor sidelines. Zamora himself thinks that congressmen are now mainly “implementors of government projects. Without this, what else do we do?”

By being in Congress, Zamora thinks he is giving people like himself access to power, as well as to funds that other politicians would probably be pocketing for their reelection campaign. He says, “The power I’m having now can really help the people.” With a simple phone call to the local electric cooperative in Compostela Valley during a power outage, he can have electricity restored in his district. He can ask the President for more money to build roads to link isolated barangays to the center.

He has voted in favor of the bills on absentee voting and anti-money laundering. Like the good Lakas member that he is, he voted for Jose de Venecia as Speaker of the House. He has a pending bill to install a one-kilogram stone in every barangay to guard farmers against being cheated by traders whose weighing scales have questionable calibration. But this street-smart probinsiyano also has a parking-lot bill, which says that fees charged by parking-lot operators using government property should go to the state.