ONE cab driver’s joke left us in uneasy laughter. If you buy a car five years from now, he said, you’ll find yourself stuck in exactly the same spot where you bought the vehicle. Tough luck if you’ll ever get to move.

Cebu City’s traffic problem is, to borrow a phrase, “perennial as the grass.” Three years ago, the GPS-based traffic app Waze declared our corner of the world as the worst place in the planet for drivers. Again, that was 2016. Today, we’ve probably mastered Zen skills to our traffic survival kit. Metro Cebu had just turned the term “rush hour” into the most ironic phrase in the English language.

Since Metro Cebu’s politics is a musical chair with the same old players wriggling their butts for the power seat, in this elections, it may help if we move the discussions into issues of accountability.

Just where exactly was foresight among our public officials as far as the metro’s traffic situation is concerned? One administrative term to the next, what strides have been taken to address road congestion? Just how much of the solutions have been waylaid in the cacophony of politics?

Cebu City’s mayoral candidates Mayor Tomas Osmeña and Vice Mayor Edgardo Labella had been in the seat for as long as we remember. Both gentlemen agreed to a public debate that the Integrated Bar of the Philippines will set up. Never mind Osmeña’s prior word about survey leaders not needing debates. He had agreed to a debate and Labella doesn’t seem to have any problem about it. It will be opportune time in the campaign season to see how these two officials will answer questions of accountability in relation to the city’s perennial problems.

Let’s ask them the hard particulars of how they carried out their roles as problem-solvers for the city’s multitude of woes—traffic congestion, flooding, garbage, drainage, among others. Will they be able to point out the shortcomings? Will they acknowledge the chances that they, too, have been part of the problem?

Let’s talk in the past-tense, and do away with promises. Let’s hold them into account for our daily curse of delays in road movement, the shameless waste in gas and time and opportunities, all in the name of a hellish traffic congestion that seems to outlive our generation.