My reaction to Mayor Michael Rama’s State of the City Address (Soca) is nothing short of utter dejection. Using the first letters of Barug to list down his achievements was vintage Rama rhetoric. He boasted of improving, not of having improved, everything else other than the quality of life of the citizens of Cebu City, most especially of small folks who need government help the most.
He bragged about better business environment and employment opportunities. But his physical improvement of Carbon market has actually deprived ambulant vendors of their livelihood and caused their spirits to sag.
He made a big deal out of resettling informal settlers of river easement areas. The reality, however, is that some whose houses have been demolished and others who are threatened with demolition received only a one-time cash assistance or promise thereof but emphatically told, request after request, to expect nothing more. This is a flagrant violation of a constitutional provision that disallows demolition without proper compensation and relocation.
And whatever makes him think he gets bragging rights for burdening citizens with a higher real property tax?
How too, if not for lack of anything socially relevant to say, has his forced transfer of the Sinulog venue to SRP (South Road Properties) become a feat worth bragging about? What benefits exactly did citizens get when he imposed the transfer in spite of adverse ground conditions and contrary opinions? The move might have benefitted SM, Nustar and IL Corso but definitely not the devotees of Sto. Niño who were in fact greatly inconvenienced by it.
Mayor Rama has done nothing to improve the lives of Cebu’s small people. He talks big but nothing is really happening on the ground to improve the lives of Cebu City’s marginalized sector. He is improving the business environment only for big business.
He tags his Singapore-like dream as “everybody’s” dream. By everybody he must mean his political sycophants. In any case, it is a flight of fancy that has been dead in the water from the very start. All one has to do is observe the City’s irregular and haphazard garbage collection system. Another is to watch the floods rush in within minutes of a downpour on account of drainage being heavily clogged up by trash, plastics mostly.
Finally, he asks people not to be destructive. But he should be telling himself that because he’s the one destroying the lives of people when he displaces informal settlers and sweeps vendors and homeless folks from sidewalks without compensation and relocation, when he scatters ambulant vendors who must now look for their own sales nooks in the privatized zombie land that Carbon market has become for many of them.
And because he really has nothing to brag about other than quixotic dreams, he just had to resort to a PowerPoint presentation as a way of hiding behind pictures the cruel reality behind his flamboyant Soca. Nothing more than plain window dressing.