Sunday, May 04, 2008 Mercado: The world is flat By Juan L. Mercado Sidebar
SUN.STAR published Friday a furious letter from Mayor Tomas Osmeña.
Titled "Bad Water District," His Honor wrote: "For about two decades now, Cebu has had a reputation of having a serious water problem. This has been the single biggest item in the list of negatives for Cebu as an investment destination and a liveable city."
Osmeña lashed Metropolitan Cebu Water District Armando Paredes. The MCWD's manager blamed the board of directors for agency's piping water to only 30 percent of households in its franchise area. "The truth is, there is only a bad water district," Osmeña asserted. "There is no water problem in Cebu."
No? Then the world is flat.
Osmeña's 297-hectare South Road Properties, in fact, is water-short. It doesn't have a single rain-harvesting device in place. Compare that to Singapore's 90 percent coverage---excluding those in 461 hectares leased from Johore state.
We Cebuanos don't have the "Saudi option": that of swapping oil for water.
Oil costs $120 a barrel, up from $26 five years ago. Thus, the energy-intensive desalination alternative Osmeña touted is priced beyond reach.
We're broke too. A full quarter of the city's budget pays for yen loans Osmeña signed for.
Daily, Singapore imports 1.14 billion liters of surface water from Johore. So, why can't Cebu pipe surface water, from Carmen or Badian? Project proposals by World Bank, Ayala, Stateland Equity and Viscal corporations for such projects were torpedoed by Osmeña. Water costs would be "excessive," he claimed.
These sound bytes play to the masa. But they've not bought an additional drop for Cebuanos. Slum dwellers pay from 3 to 10 times for murky water from ambulant peddlers, UN "Human Development Report" notes.
Inaction from blindness handcuffs us to crumbling aquifers. Cebu siphons up to 300,000 cubic meters daily from its narrow aquifers. They recharge only half that volume, even as demand will double in 22 years. This guarantees ecological bankruptcy.
The warning flags are up. Salt now taints a third of aquifers. This damage is irreversible. Water tables have slumped as more people drill wells. All rivers here are biologically dead. Thus, the President signed into law (RA 9486) to curb ravaging of stressed watersheds.
In Cebu, "water policy is a black hole," the Inquirer noted. "Shortages are replacing yesterday's surpluses. To close that gap, it borrows from tomorrow."
Osmeña scoffs at the stream of scientific reports on this city's water crunch: Delft University, Asian Development Bank, Camp Dresser & McKee, World Bank, United Nations Development Programme, University of the Philippines, Water Resources Center, US Aid, etc.
Cebu's "harem of eunuchs"---councilors, officials, propagandists---play doormat for whatever the mayor says, be it water, vigilantes, traffic, gutting tax base of opposition barangays like Lahug or brawling with Capitol. No one tells the emperor he has no clothes.
But investors are different. They put their shekels, not because a mayor insists the world is flat. They do so on hard data and assurance that policies will be fairly implemented, over the long pull.
Osmeña pins the blame for investment lag on a "water district that is bad." Sure. MCWD will not win any world prize soon. It underworks, is overstaffed and rarely innovates, as Osmeña correctly notes.
But one obsolete agency can not explain away investor reluctance. Could it be the investors do not agree with the mayor the world is flat? Do they instead heed the scientists warning that Cebu's water shortage, unless resolved, could wreck the future?
Perhaps, a city, without trees, sewers, flood drainage, plus a surplus of murderous vigilantes and malnourished kids, is also crippled by a "governance that is bad"?
