PGMA’s great idea to decongest Metro Manila

One of our biggest gripes over that monolith called Imperial Manila is that, a lot of people there think that Manila is the Philippines and the Philippines is Manila... the rest of us are just a tiny part of the entire archipelago called the "provinces!" Manila is the political and financial center, the Alpha and Omega of the Philippines, which is why close to 80 percent of the entire money supply in this country can be found in Metro Manila.

The "provinces" just have to make ends meet in terms of infrastructure development and growing up as a whole... while big brother Imperial Manila corners everything that goes into the Philippines... politically, socially and financially! All this, thanks to a highly-centralized form of government... a system that has totally failed this country in the last 56 years since the Americans gave us independence on the 4th of July 1946.

Indeed, a centralized form of government has time and again proven to be it own folly. Our centralized system gives the misconception that the peoples in the north are superior to those living in the south. Let me point out, however, that this situations isn’t exclusive to the Philippines. It happened 200’ years ago in the United States and triggered the Civil War between the North and South.

Today, a similar situation is happening even in Japan with Tokyo, the modern Japanese capital, versus the Osaka-Kyoto metropolis, the old capital of Imperial Japan. In a way, the same rift is taking place in merry old England between Scotland and the rest of England. Here at home, when the Portuguese explorer in the employ of King Philip, Ferdinand Magellan, found this archipelago, Cebu become the center of this nation. Incidentally, it’s still the country’s geographical center and heart of the Philippines. All that changed when Miguel Lopez de Legazpi came here not only to reclaim what Magellan discovered, but also to move the capital to Manila. Since then, we’ve had this north-south rift.

Thus, it was a pleasant surprise to many of us when President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA) came to Cebu two weeks ago and announced that she had asked former Cebu Governor Emilio "Lito" Osmena to oversee the "decongestion" of the nation’s capital and work out a plan to disperse our population. Of course, this brings some suspicion that President Arroyo might be doing this as an act of a political compromise to Lito Osmena by taking the cudgels to one of the basic programs of his political party called Probinsya Muna Development Initiatives (PROMDI). Hence, we ask this intriguing query: Is PGMA serious?

Of course, there are only two sides to this coin.... She either believes in the principles espoused by PROMDI or she is merely making a "gesture" of support to this program. It is easy to be suspicious. After all, when the President announced this, it was just too good to be true and a step in the right direction!

But then, the President didn’t just merely announce Lito’s appointment – she also announced that more than 100,000 national government employees would be dispersed to new towns in Northern Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao! To top it all, she directed Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes and Armed Forces chief of staff Gen. Benjamin Defensor to effect the immediate transfer of the headquarters of the Philippine Marines from Metro Manila to Cabatangan, south of Zamboanga City. When this order becomes final or permanent, you will hear a lot of your Marine soldiers speaking in Chavacano... the official dialect of Zamboanga!

We gathered that Tourism would be headquartered in Subic and I hope that this is not an accommodation to our good friend, Tourism Secretary Richard "Dick" Gordon. Cebu would probably have the Department of Trade and Industry moved here... that means a lot of hopeful pretty girls are going to see more of DTI Secretary Manuel "Mar" Roxas right here in Cebu.

Like I said, this is a step in the right direction and it is a fact that this is already happening to many countries. For instance, in the United States, the financial capital is New York City, while the political capital is Washington, D.C. In Germany, the political capital is in Bonn… but I guess they want to get it back to Berlin. But the business capital is in Munich. In Brazil, they even did better by getting the political capital away from San Paolo and building a new one, which they called Brasilia in the deep forest fastness of the Amazon. I don’t see any reason why we should be different.

Again, let me point out that the highly-centralized form of governments that was the Soviet Union collapsed on its owns weight... so much for the utopian dream called communism. But while the Philippines is not a communist state, the ills of this nation stem from a very highly centralized form of government. Practically everything has to pass through Manila for even our smallest needs.

This brings me back to House Bill No. 2542 authored by our very own Rep. Jose "Dodong" Gullas, which intends to regionalize the payroll of public elementary school teachers and non-teaching staff. This has been the practice for so many decades, which why the majority of our elementary school teachers belong to the poverty line because they can easily fall prey to those unscrupulous vultures or 5/6 money lenders. It had to take Rep. Dodong Gullas to work out a scheme to break this highly-centralized but gravely wrong practice.

Here in Cebu, we already have two authorities, the Cebu Port Authority (CPA) and the Mactan Cebu International Airport Authority (MCIAA) and hopefully, soon, a Metro Cebu Traffic Authority (MCTA). Why is this happening here? Because Cebuano saw the wrongs or the evils of a highly-centralized government and did something positive about it. I, for one, live by the principle espoused by the late US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy who once quipped, "some people see things as they are and ask why? others see things as they should and ask... why not? Perhaps Pres. Arroyo already asked herself this question and asked herself... why not?

No doubt, President Arroyo is moving in the right direction. Though it is small step, but it is the beginning of a huge stride to a better-run Philippines... a Philippines that’s not just Manila, but Cebu, Zamboanga, Davao, Olongapo, Legaspi, Butuan, Tacloban, Iloilo, Bacolod Catarman, Laoag... etc. etc!

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected] Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.thefreeman.com. He also hosts a weekly talk show entitled, "Straight from the Sky" shown every Monday only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 on SkyCable at 8 p.m.