Wednesday, August 29, 2007 Carvajal: Pride of place By Orlando P. Carvajal Break Point
EVERY modern city, even the richest of them, has a seamy side. Cebu City is no exception.
Like any bustling city that attracts people to its opportunities for education, jobs and an exciting life, it has run-down, foul-smelling and squalid slum areas, a dirty underbelly which is the graveyard mostly of failed lives and broken dreams.
When visitors, however, observe that Cebu City is a very dirty place, they do not refer to these slums. They refer to parts of Cebu City like its main streets and significant places like Fuente Osmeña that they expect to be clean but are not.
This is what baffles many self-respecting Cebuanos. Why can’t we have a clean city? Why are we tolerating a very dirty environment that is not good for our self-respect, not good for business, especially for tourism which is correctly observed to be on the verge of a take-off?
People understand that the squalor in our slums is not easy to solve. It is not only a huge but also a complex issue. But what is so complicated about keeping the sidewalks, say around Fuente Osmeña, clean? What is so expensive about disciplining people not to throw their garbage anywhere and any time they want to? I know we are not wallowing in funds, but is the Queen City of the South so destitute as to be primitively dirty?
Is it perhaps because our city officials never go down from their air-conditioned cars to stroll the dirty sidewalks of the city? From their tinted cars they definitely cannot see all the litter, neither can they get a whiff of the reek of dried up urine and other foul smell coming from the sidewalk. Are our city officials proud at all of Cebu City? If they are, it certainly does not show.
When I lived in Davao City, every visitor I toured around was impressed by the cleanliness and the order in its streets. Davao has other issues that prevent it from becoming a premier tourist destination but cleanliness is definitely not an issue. I have also glimpsed at the cleanliness, order and discipline of Marikina. Which means cleanliness is possible when public officials have the pride of place to do it.
If the Council cannot stand up to the mayor on most issues, can they not at least be on top of the cleanliness issue? If we need a long time and a lot of money to solve our slums, can we not at least have a program to keep the city’s main places clean since here, more than money we only need a modicum of political will?
Needless to say, Cebu’s civil society (business, religion, academe, etc) must also show its own pride of place and take its share of responsibility for cleaning its environs. Challenging City Hall can be a start but it must also have its own affirmative action.
