After organizers weathered a storm of controversies during the yearlong preparations, the threat of a typhoon blew off-course the summit, making what could have been Cebu’s Main Event into the Year’s Missed Event.
While hotel executives scrambled to deal with cancellations when the summit was postponed from Dec. 10-14, 2006 to Jan. 10-14, 2007, locals shifted from the irritants of traffic rerouting and security dry runs to speculate on the “real” reason behind the summit’s change of date.
Typhoon Seniang’s maximum sustained winds of 120 kph and gustiness of up to 150 kph certainly did not create the buzz on the street.
Pundits hazarded a different kind of battering if international visitors, including the media, would witness the country’s state of upheaval over a move to change the Constitution.
House of discord
To be affixed in the imagination of the public, an event requires an image of strong emotional resonance.
In terms of political iconography, the Cebu International Convention Center (CICC) is peerless in epitomizing discordance and dispute.
In 2003, the Cebu Provincial Government sponsored a national design contest for the Cebu Megadome, envisioned to be the province’s first world-class complex for sports.
Architect Alexius Medalla’s “spinning disc” entry won the prize.
Up to now, he has yet to receive 10 percent of the project cost, or P12.5 million, which the Capitol promised him.
In 2004, Capitol approved a budget of P250 million for the Megadome, which the opposition in the Provincial Board blocked.
In late 2005, after President Arroyo chose Cebu as the venue for the 12th Asean Summit, Cebu Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia revived the Megadome project, with revisions.
First to be dropped was Medalla and his disc, deemed too extreme to meet the original December summit deadline.
Capitol chose to award P12.5 million of the P370 million budgeted for the CICC project to Architect Manuel Guanzon and Associates. Guanzon’s alternate design of structural steel, glass and aluminum cladding—featuring a yoke symbolizing unity among Asean nations—was viewed as more realistic.
As things turned out, the twin yokes of deadline and cost bedeviled the builders of the CICC.
Ballooning public expenditure—from the Megadome’s P250-million budget in 2004 to Guanzon’s P370-million redesign to the final P515-million tab to complete targets—had groups decrying the “lavish preparations” for the summit and calling for public accounting.
The runaway financial figures contrasted with the painfully slow transformation of the structure itself.
Among Cebuanos torn between pride and embarrassment, the rundown to the November deadline and the subsequent extensions may have even overshadowed the traditional countdown to Christmas.
Bullish or desperate, Guanzon upped the ante on his half-a-million-peso wager in August to P1.5 million in October against those willing to put their money behind their doubts that he could deliver his “pet project” on time.
Although former senator John Osmeña kibitzed, they did not come to terms on the mechanics of the betting.
Making history
On Dec. 8, 2006, the CICC was blessed and inaugurated.
Hours later, barely three days away from the scheduled opening of the summit, Philippine officials announced its postponement.
The CICC illumines the dim North Reclamation Area like the grandest house in the barrio, awe-inspiring but a little forlorn to its nightly sightseers who know no one’s home.
It’s a ghost of its early December self when full-costumed contingents rehearsed to present a smorgasbord of local culture, part of Mandaue City’s bid to become the “Emerging Convention City in Asia.” (Mandaue, which owns the 3.8-hectare site of the CICC, entered into a joint venture with the Provincial Government for the edifice’s construction.)
Foreign affairs officials estimate that Cebu stands to gain P1.2 billion in economic benefits for hosting the summit.
There certainly is no physical reminder that, at the height of controversies, the CICC rivaled the historic Colon junction and Fuente Osmeña as the setting of street protests.
The center’s perimeter wall has served as an impromptu freedom wall for all stripes of political persuasions—from a cause-oriented group’s exorcism rite to pro-establishment streamers lambasting local broadcaster Leo Lastimosa for “anti-CICC, anti-Cebu” critiques.
Alleged underpayment of subcontracted labor and the electrocution of a welder’s aide last October have not resulted in the CICC edging out the Manila Film Center in the nation’s iconography of the Imeldific and the tragic.
(Rushing to complete the facility for the 1981 international film fest, more than a hundred workers died after their scaffolding collapsed.)
Jewel
Disregarding critics and media sniping at the CICC’s construction, Governor Garcia declared that, “most importantly, we learned that we can do it. And we can do it again.”
Cebuanos will be looking to January 2007 for indications whether the governor’s optimism is justified or if, like Thai owners saddled with albino elephants that are sacred and thus cannot be put to work, the CICC could be the latest of many publicly funded white elephants.
