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Saturday, April 09, 2005
Roperos: The SRP syndrome
By Godofredo M. Roperos
Politics Also
The way things look to us, the South Reclamation Project (SRP) has become a symbol of what ails not only our city but also the rest of the country. It is a collection of symptoms of economic malaise that could trace their roots to both the private and public sectors’ inability to set common goals for their common good and work together to conscientiously achieve them.
The SRP was conceived with a noble purpose: to provide thousands of jobs for the people to make a living on. Yet, on the way to its realization, things just began to emerge to put various stumbling blocks.
Look at what’s happening now. It has become a project where the economic interests caught captive by the politics in its bowels has placed a stranglehold on the whole metropolis, as epitomized by the estimated P2.3 billion original loan that have almost tripled because of the interest incurred over the years.
The controversy that the project has engendered, the red tapes to which the titling of the lots is enmeshed in thus effectively delaying their “marketing” and the sense of insecurity the ballooning interest on the loan has generated among Cebu City officials--these have opened a horizon of hopelessness in the public mind regarding the project’s benefits.
Now comes the report that Cebu City Mayor Tom Osmeña will sue the President for being instrumental in making his city breach the bilateral agreement signed with the Japan Bank for International Cooperation. He said he would stop paying the loan amortization with Land Bank unless the titles to the 295 hectares of reclaimed land under the SRP are released by August this year. In the meantime, he needs P150 million to pay the interest.
What the mayor said may just a product of his exasperation over the delay in SRP’s development because of politics, or the failure to use what is called the art of compromise. The conflict with Talisay City could easily have been ironed out if both contending political leaders decided to talk over the problem. Then the delay would not have happened.
As it is, the city has suffered a great loss in opportunities but the greater loser is the citizenry in the jobs they could have had, but did not, because of the controversy, the end of which is still not yet in sight. Indeed, with the country now overburdened with more than four million jobless people, the SRP’s opening would have been a ray of hope.
I`m sure most everyone in the city is hoping that the SRP syndrome would not worsen to a point where Mayor Tom would be forced to bite the bullet of his own temper.
But such a temper, according to a political scientist friend, should be understandable coming from a man who has almost grown old in public service. It is a temper, according to him, that is breed from frustration when things do not turn out the way one wants it to, or when somebody else’s politics unduly intrudes into the picture.
Whether such observation is true or not with Mayor Osmeña and his SRP, the fact remains that the project is well on the way to becoming a white elephant, and the city just might be left cradling on its helpless lap a multibillion-peso loan that its inhabitants would be duty bound to pay through the coming years whether they like it or not.
That, probably, is what makes the mayor’s temper rise, and prod him to do what no other city executive in this republic has yet done—sue the President as a party to a breach of contract.
(April 9, 2005 issue)
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