Mercado: Will singing bird come?

Saturday, December 31, 2011

ON New Year, many fret over the future. Cebuanos have no monopoly on being spooked. In Shakespeare’s 1605 play “Macbeth,” Banquo urges the spirits: "If you can look into the seeds of time, and say/ which grain will grow and which will not/ speak then unto me.”

Peering into the future is not for patsies. Few have the vision that goes beyond one, let alone, three generations. Flushing Cebu’s aquifers, contaminated by salt due to over-pumping, for example, can take a century, says the Water Resources Center.

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End-of-the-year exchanges between Mayor Mike Rama and Rep. Tomas Osmeña, however, have one issue: Who is the bigger jerk?

Osmeña disdains legislating. He prefers to loiter in his previous incarnation as mayor. Rama’s budget has been castrated by a pro-Osmeña city council. It gutted, among others, allocations for drainage and fire department.

By happenstance, post-typhoon “Sendong” rainfall, interlocked with a cold front. That swamped a near-treeless city’s obsolete drainage system clogged with trash and plastic. Dozens clambered on to roofs. Others paddled their escape out.

Four of the city’s 10 obsolete fire trucks conked out in the five-day fire that razed Gaisano Mall. Wearing torn coats and shoddy boots, firemen used muscle power, instead of tools, to open the mall’s door.

Yet, Osmeña claims Cebu bolted into a “neo-international city under his watch.” Nonsense. An international study on urban competitiveness last year ranked Cebu as 475 out of 500 cities.

We lagged behind Ho Chi Minh City of Vietnam, lodged at slot 302. Phnom Penh in Cambodia ranked 415. Even Yangoon in Myanmar, run down by the military tatmadaw, beat Cebu by a whisker at slot 446.

“Cebu needs ‘a lot of fixing,’” president of the Cebu Business Club Gordon “Dondi” Joseph candidly says. International surveys of livable cities in Asia show “Cebu reduced quality of life index. It has the highest poverty incidence.”

“Make sure the poor have reason for hope,” 1999 Nobel Economics Laureate Amartya Sen always stressed. In contrast, Osmeña’s irritated riposte to critics was: “Go. Live somewhere else.”

That doesn’t wash anymore. There is a growing number of scientific analyses that “business-as-usual” governance is a recipe for disaster.

Cebu must re-invent itself, as weather events become more extreme, cautions a new study that peers 30 years into the future. Bank of the Philippine Islands Foundation and World Wild Life Philippines just published “Business Risk Assessment and Management of Climate Change Impacts.”

Despite many assets, crime solution efficiency here was only 21 percent. Cebu is tailender in human development. Landslides are increasingly severe and 23 of 80 barangays encroach on vital watersheds. El Niño disturbances, rising levels of ever-warmer seas, severe rainfall interlocking with prolonged drought, shatter predictability.

Cebu’s leaders must look “beyond its fences.” They should forge new directions that lead to global integration in a climate-defined future. Effective governance and water resources management will shape the city’s future.

City Hall cannot do the job alone. “Public-private partnerships” and “business friendly policies and regulations” are vital. From 13 Metro Cebu cities and towns, 21 businessmen and civil society leaders formed Metro Cebu Development Coordinating Board to open doors to tomorrow.

They give fretful people hope. “If you keep green boughs of hope in your heart,” the Chinese proverb says, “the singing bird will come.”