Mercado: Council theme song?

Saturday, August 27, 2011

CEBU City’s 2011 political brawls recall the 1956 Platter’s schmaltzy song: “The Great Pretender.” In one corner is Mayor Mike Rama and allies. In the other corner is a City Council that proxies for Rep. Tomas Osmeña--whose legislative performance won’t make the history books. “All are experts,” as Notre Dame University president Theodore Heshburg once said, “at practicing virtue (from) a distance.”

Cebunaos are affected by ill-fed kids, jobless migrants, collapsing aquifers, potholed roads, plastic-clogged drainage that trigger serial flashfloods, etc. This burg is also saddled with the classic “double burden” of disease: Third World ailments, like diarrhea, persist even as the toll from “modern ailments,” such as stroke and obesity, mount.

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Erratic weather is causing sea levels to surge and swamp the city’s low lying areas.

Solutions will require of those entrusted with office, vision, goodwill--and a capacity to rise above self. The need has become urgent since cyberspace technology has compressed distance and time. Cebu is bogged down in 19th century practices that official mindsets of political buccaneers clamp on.

The needed leadership has not emerged in today’s controversy over the city’s Supplemental Budget No. 2. That did not happen yesterday over the issue of clearing illegal settlers in city creeks. That won’t happen tomorrow on, say future sales of South Properties lots.

Why so?

Sun.Star put its editorial finger on the problem. “The current city council is not (Mayor Mike) Rama’s stamp-pad. It is however, a rubber stamp of an “outsider” (Rep. Tomas) Osmeña. A former ally, (Osmeña) is now a harsh critic of Rama. It can’t claim anything altruistic, therefore, when it comes to its dealings with the mayor…Vice Mayor

Joy Augustus Young (has) become increasingly belligerent when talking about the mayor….”

The good vice-mayor, it appears, merely heeds Mark Twain’s well-honed counsel, “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.” Playing pit bull wins for Young brownie points from his patron. But subservience always undercuts good governance.

We’re skidding, willy-nilly, into a dead-end of shabby health services, half-schooled kids, brackish water wells to latrine-creeks. If one looks beyond city limits, one sees elsewhere what John Eberhard of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calls a “third generation of sustainable cities that mimic the metabolism of nature.”

“Cities can be engines of growth,” World Bank notes in its, “Entering the 21st Century” report. “They can be made livable.” To achieve that, city officials must think different, adds Worldwatch Institute in a special study on “A New Vision for Our Cities.” Leaders who break out from mental ruts are only the first step.

They must go on to craft policies on land use, sustained financing of infrastructure and spur private sector entrepreneurship, World Bank adds. “Punishment for failures will be experienced more quickly than in the past.”

Councils “mainly review executive transactions and process requests for financial allocations,” a UP Public Administration study of Pangasinan and Cebu reveals.

The present council has a track record of clicking its heels whenever Osmeña snaps his fingers. Are they capable, like the proverbial old dog, of learning new tricks?

Indeed, “the greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.” That’s from Socrates, not the Platters.

(juanlmercado@gmail.com)