Why we shouldn’t create new provinces

The new school year has opened and in Central Visayas, enrollment reached 1.39 million with 35,000 new students just in Cebu alone. As expected, we faced the usual school opening problems, like the shortage of over 5,000 classrooms aggravated by a serious shortage of teachers nationwide. No doubt, the Department of Education (DepEd) was harassed with the opening of school, but its officials already knew what was coming to them!

That the DepEd is having difficulty in hiring new teachers is a problem it still has to solve. In Cebu City alone, only 78 new applicants for teaching positions out of 1,248 passed the qualifying examinations. I gathered that nationwide, there’s a demand for 10,000 new teachers. While we’re not happy to report the results of the examinations, however, we’re elated that at least, the DepEd isn’t allowing unqualified teachers to teach our students, which should do well to improve our passing averages, which have been going down for many years.

Worse, for parents, almost all schools slapped this year an additional 10 percent in tuition and other fees. But understandably, if the schools didn’t exact higher tuition, how then could they attract new teachers or keep the good ones? Call it a catch 22 situation, but that’s the reality with schools today and all we need to do is tighten our belts!

The shortage of teachers and classrooms with this week’s school opening isn’t really new... after all, we’ve heard these reports being published year after year after year. What I cannot fathom was the report I read on Page 4 of The Philippine STAR last Monday, where Rep. Rolando Andaya Jr., chairman of the House appropriations committee, blamed our "blistering 2.3 percent annual population growth" as the real culprit behind the overcrowding in our schools. Excuse me, Sir, but if you didn’t know, the population just didn’t explode on our faces and suddenly the DepEd was deluged with new students this school year!

The fact is Congress, especially the House committee on appropriations, never made a good forecast of the number of students going to schools every year, hence, the DepEd get harassed every school opening! It is time for congressmen to confess that they are to blame for the shortage of classrooms... after all, they’re the ones who appropriate money for this.

If only our congressmen didn’t spend their pork barrel on useless projects (because they only advertise the names of the congressmen doing them) like skywalks or pedestrian overpasses that nobody uses, we would have more classrooms for our students this year.

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Our fight to keep Cebu intact as one province has prompted us to research more about this issue and true enough, there was, indeed, a recent case study on it entitled "Fragmentation vs. Consolidation" published by the Local Government Development Foundation (LOGODEF) and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Foundation, which gave clear details on the impending disaster that would happen to Cebu province if we break it apart. All told, the study overwhelmingly suggests that in the Philippines we ought to consolidate local governments, not fragment or break them apart.

What struck me with that case study was a comparative analysis of China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Japan. China, with its 1.2 billion people and 9.3 billion square kilometers, only has 23 provinces, five autonomous regions and two special administrative regions (SARs). Indonesia, with its population of 238 million, only has 30 provinces and two special regions. Japan, with its 127 million people, only has 47 prefectures. Look at the Philippines, a poor country, which has a total of 79 provinces and yet they are not enough!

Our politicians want to create more provinces. What kind of future would Cebu have when we have more people earning a living as politicians because if they have their way, we would have three more governors and a multitude of their staff to feed? What future can our youth hope for?

According to that study, the cost of holding a referendum or plebiscite on this issue is around P40 million for each province... money we obviously do not have. The barangay elections were postponed this year precisely due to lack of money. Congress could not even appropriate additional money to build 5,000 new classrooms! So why in heaven’s name should we spend it for a referendum just to find out whether Cebuanos want to break up Cebu or not? That’s a sheer waste of public funds!

There’s more! Based on actual studies, the creation of a new province would cost the taxpayers an estimated P686 million. Multiplying this by the three new provinces for Cebu, it just makes me wonder where in heaven’s name will the Philippine government find the funds to create new provinces in order to satisfy the bloated egos of last-term politicians.

We do not need a swami with a crystal ball to know where we should go for a better future, and the breaking up of provinces, whether Cebu, Quezon or Leyte, is the wrong way because we just can’t afford it anymore. We should spend the money we have to educate our children, not create new provinces. In fact, one thing that the study didn’t mention, which crossed my mind as the best reason why we should not create new provinces or cities, is that the more provinces we have, the more politicians we would have. And politics has done more to ruin us than help us!

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That The Philippine STAR lost a jewel of a columnist in Teodoro "Teddyman" Benigno and The STAR’s music and theater critic Jess Cruz is a loss we all share in The STAR family. I met Teddy Benigno only twice, once in Manila and once at the Shangri-La’s Mactan Island Resort when he launched his book here and he was what I would say a "columnist’s columnist" in the sense that a few writers today could make columns the way he did. We could only wish we could write in his style. Alas, he’s gone to the great beyond! May we request our pious readers to pray for the repose of their souls.

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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, "Straight from the Sky," shown every Monday, at 8 p.m. only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.