Tuesday, April 01, 2008 Ledesma: Best place to live in, Davao City By Jun Ledesma Sunbursts
THE mountain is more visible from afar. The closer you get to it the lesser you see of its grandeur. When you are right in the midst of it your vision is limited only to your immediate surroundings.
Such is the case when one lives right in the heart of a city for years. We tend to ignore the beauty of our towns and cities and consider whatever assets as banal and ordinary.
Thus it takes someone from afar to really see the splendor and other vital attributes of a city like Davao.
"Money Sense", a bible of entrepreneurs and the business community, recently came up with a list of 20 best places to live in the Philippines. Davao City was ranked third, the first being Bacolod (the city of my birth) and 2nd Makati. Only a thin line of difference divides the three.
But each has its own distinct attributes. Makati is the business center. Bacolod has its laidback yet urban atmosphere, and Davao its peace, its livability, competitiveness and more.
There are leaders and there are leaders. The distinctions that Davao City has been endowed with for over a decade ran parallel with the incumbency of City Mayor Rodrigo R. Duterte. These awards and distinctions were or are not inventions of the Mayor. No one can argue with success especially when these are crowned with awards and distinctions conferred by institutions of unquestionable integrity.
Let's look back. Asiaweek has placed Davao City as the 19th Best City in Asia.
The prestigious Asian Institute of Management ranked Davao City for three consecutive years as the Most Competitive Metro City in the Philippines. Of course we know that Davao City too remained to be the Most Livable City in the Philippines.
Money Sense obtained the criteria and the statistics of the search bodies that they made as bases to arrive at a substantive and critical decision in their selection process. MS extrapolated the data and came out with 20 cities that made it to their list of the Best Cities in the Philippines. It's a clever formula.
You have to buy Money Sense Magazine from your favorite newsstands to see the 17 other cities that made it to the Best City category.
So you are convinced that Davao is the most peaceful city in the Philippines. This is correct but not a few will be surprised to learn more. This southern capital is also the Most Peaceful City in the East and Southeast Asia! That UN rapporteur, Philip Alston, should go hang for reporting to the United Nations that people are summarily killed here and that we have a record of human rights violations.
But yes, we have a number of drug lords and pushers including inveterate criminal elements who made it to the death statistics. Precisely we have been enjoying this peaceful environment because the scum had been eliminated. The error of Alston was to swallow hook, line, and sinker, the statistics fed to him by so-called human rights activists in the comfort of his hotel room. It was gross stupidity for him to believe the death statistics that date back to the era when the CPP-NPA were in complete control of Davao City.
This generation has forgotten or conveniently forgot that NPA hit squads called "Sparrows" were executing people regularly in the 1980s. This is not to include mass executions (remember Rano Massacre?) and executions of its own members who were suspected to have turned government agents. Alston, who stayed here for one day, became an overnight expert of human rights violations and summary execution. He must have been so scared he never left the confines of the plush Marco Polo Hotel and then left in a huff. Had he stayed a little longer, he should have learned that our Mayor Rudy has done a little better than New York's Mayor Rudy Guillani who had his own way of dealing with criminals in that cement jungle where the UN headquarters is situated. If Alston did his job he should have learned that the death and crime statistics in Davao is not even a tenth of New York's.
A testament to how the city residents approve of Mayor Duterte's administration and management is the unprecedented and overwhelming votes that they cast for him. His political constituents has given his daughter, Inday Sara Duterte, city vice mayor, a mind-boggling avalanche of votes, which are a convincing and unflinching tribute and demonstration of loyalty to the Dutertes.
The mayor is bowing out of office by 2010 but already the transition is practically mandated. Sara is a good student of governance and learning it from her father is a unique advantage. It's an assurance after 2010 Davao City will continue to enjoy that niche of being the most livable, the most competitive and the most peaceful place on earth.
