Wednesday, December 13, 2006 Wenceslao: Metro Manila as summit host? By Bong O. Wenceslao Candid Thoughts
LET us set aside questions on why the Asean summit had to be postponed from December to January. Forget, too, the what-might-have-been. As for the mess and the losses the postponement caused, continue the mending work. In the meantime, let us focus on the summit's tentative schedule, which is more than a week before the Sinulog.
So there. What you have is a reverse of Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña's make-the-summit-sites-a-ghost-town concept of securing the international gathering. Or at least that applies to Cebu City, considering the Sinulog.
(Funny, but many people seemed to have forgotten that decades ago, we called this festivity Fiesta Señor, and not Sinulog.)
The Osmeña scheme encouraged towns and the city's mountain barangays to hold festivals to draw the crowd away from the summit sites of Cebu City, Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu---the better to secure the activity. But what festival could match the crowd-drawing power of the religious and cultural activities of the feast of the Child Jesus?
You cannot drive away the thousands of So. Niño devotees who flock to the Basilica del Sto. Niño and its environs weeks before the feast. Even the power of the travel advisories of Britain, the United States, Japan, Australia and New Zealand would weaken with the strength of the Sinulog's pull on tourists and the usual balikbayans.
In short, the summit's National Organizing Committee now has a situation. If the international gathering will push through in Cebu on the second week of January, security plans have to be revised. Include there the traffic plan. This time around, they will have to factor in a Cebu City bursting at the seams with people in the security and traffic plans.
That may mean putting all the activities in Lapu-Lapu and Mandaue, allowing Cebu to celebrate the fiesta unhampered. After all, summit sites like Shangri-La and the Cebu International Convention Center are outside Cebu City. This also means traffic-disturbing affairs in the city, like those for the delegates' spouses, should be called off.
But even with the adjustments, the task of securing the summit sites and controlling the traffic in Metro Cebu will still be great. Which brings the possibility that, should the tentative dates for the summit become definite, the summit site might be transferred altogether. We know that Metro Manila has always been the alternative host.
Let us just hope that possibility won’t happen, though.
