AN INTERNATIONAL river summit will be held in Cebu on Nov. 22 and 23. One interesting question: Why is Mandaue hosting it? Which could generate the retort, why not?
One service that most governments past and present don’t usually prioritize is the protection and maintenance of rivers, or generally, waterways. The flooding that we experience when it rains is the result of this neglect. In a way this is also a result of government officials’ lack of grasp of our history.
The communities that sprouted in Cebu coasts before the arrival of the Spaniards were dependent on the rivers and the sea as sources of food and for personal hygiene and travel. One Spanish historian even noticed how the natives would bathe in the river more than once a day.
The westernization of our culture and urbanization introduced a different mindset and lessened our dependence on the rivers and the seas with the construction of roads, the setting up of water systems and dependence on imported goods.
Soon both the rivers and the seas got neglected. To be fair, there are currently efforts to rehabilitate dirtied and blocked rivers and to use the seas as alternative to roads to move people and goods around the province’s coasts.
One high-profile rehab work is the one done by Mandaue in the waterway that it shares with Cebu City, Butuanon river. Which is probably the reason why it is keen on hosting an international river summit. The hope is that the summit will spur work on some of the metro’s important waterways and encourage local government officials to focus on these.
In Cebu City, this has been an off-and-on undertaking, depending on who is at the helm of the government. How many times has City Hall announced the clearing of the rivers of obstruction and yet those obstructions, which include houses of informal settlers, concrete structures built by establishments and huge amounts of trash, have remained?
We hope the river summit will prod local government officials to recover the determination to see the rehabilitation of our rivers through.