A very Happy New Year to one and all!

It just happened that today is New Year’s Day, the very first day of the year 2007, and so allow me to greet our faithful readers "A Very Happy New Year." I hope you started your New Year right and didn’t hurt yourself with all those firecrackers blowing up around you. I’m sure that our emergency rooms must be full of people who never listened to good advice and still lit up those deadly firecrackers despite the dangers that they posed. Like what I wrote in the past, I really have no sympathy for those people who got their fingers blown up while they were greeting the New Year.

It has been a yearly tradition in this corner to come up with our New Year’s Wish List for our first column for the New Year. First of all, you can count me in among the 91 percent of Filipinos who are very hopeful that the year 2007 would be a better one for our country. This is a huge jump from the 81 percent of Filipinos who were similarly surveyed in 2005.

But there is really a good reason why many of us are more hopeful this year than in the last few years and perhaps, that’s because it is an election year and we can only hope that the Filipino voter has matured to the point that they would now elect into office those achievers or performance-oriented politicians, rather than those who are running for office because of their having a famous name.

First on my wish list is for our successful hosting of the 12th ASEAN Leaders’ Summit, which was supposed to be held in Cebu last Dec. 11, but was postponed due to super typhoon Seniang. Barring any other natural calamities or man-made disasters, it’s all go for our hosting of the ASEAN Summit in just a couple of weeks.

The ASEAN Summit is the single greatest international event to be held in Cebu. In the past, the biggest nationwide event held here was the observance of the 400th year of Christianization in the Philippines. Back then, security wasn’t like what it is today. Then President Diosdado Macapagal joined the solemn procession together with then Cebu City Mayor Sergio "Serging" Osmeña Jr. in walking along the streets of Cebu.

That was 40 years ago and it surely isn’t a coincidence that our President today is Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA), daughter of President Diosdado Macapagal, and the mayor of Cebu City today is Tomas Osmeña, son of Serging Osmeña Jr. Cebu City then was a small backwater town that no one cared to visit. Today, Cebu is a bustling metropolis and with our hosting the ASEAN Summit, Cebu has bloomed from a pretty unkempt, dirty and untidy town into a pretty metropolis that tourists visit.

This brings me to the second wish, which we still have to achieve, as this was on my wish list in 2005, that we should have stiffer laws against traffic violators, especially the recidivists. What good are well-paved or even wide roads when we have a bunch of motorists who was only taught how to drive a vehicle, which is a very mechanical thing to do. But they know next to nothing about obeying our traffic rules and regulations. What we need is real traffic discipline, something we don’t have in our country and which is already a necessity because like it or not our economic growth is somehow linked with better traffic management.

Let me refresh you with what we wrote a couple of years ago about traffic discipline. This was a statement sent to the editor of National Geographic Magazine: "Successful economies are the result of being able to control pollution and move traffic in a very fast and efficient manner, whereas in those areas where traffic does not move because of restricted roadways and lots of pollution, the economy doesn’t move very fast."

Traffic discipline is the key ingredient for our economic growth. If there was any motto that the Marcos Dictatorship was very right when it started its autocratic reign, it was the slogan, "Ang pag-unlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan" or "Discipline is the key to progress." That slogan is still very relevant today.

To do this, we don’t even need to change our Constitution. We just need to enact stiffer laws (not necessarily stiffer fines) penalizing those repeat offenders… motorists who violate traffic laws day in and day out with impunity. The best example to follow is the one they have in the United States where they enforce a "strike three" and you’re out! That means if you break three traffic rules in a year, you’re out of the loop for a whole year. Surely, this would give these erring drivers food for thought the next time they violate our traffic rules.

Another New Year’s wish of mine is for Congress to enact a law that would prevent people from purchasing cars or vehicles unless they have a garage or a place to park them. This law is already imposed in many countries, especially in Japan. It must be said that if the year 2007 would be a good one for the Filipinos, therefore our economic growth will pull many Filipinos away from that vicious cycle of poverty and into the middle class. That means, people who used to live in shanties can now afford to buy a used vehicle… so the question is, where will they park the car? Let us pass this law before things get from bad to worse.

Finally, for this year, I wish that the Filipino people would accept the need to change our present Cory Constitution. If you looked at all the people who went to the supposedly prayer rally at the Luneta, they were led by former President Cory Aquino and her minions who wanted to perpetuate this Constitution that was created by 49 men without consulting the Filipino people who was under martial rule for 14 years. I’ve always said that when Tita Cory took over the reins of the government from the Marcos Dictatorship she should have started by fixing our basic law. She did fix it all right, but she gave us a Constitution that returned the ugly oligarchy and allowed the Marcos cronies to regain power. That’s more than enough reason why we should change our Constitution!

I’ve been a Charter change advocate since I started writing columns 20 years ago because I’ve always believed that this Constitution was created for the greater benefit of certain sectors of our society, but not the entire nation. This is why they were so much in a hurry to give us this Constitution. If the attempts to change the Charter via the people’s initiative or con-ass failed miserably, it is only because the Filipino people want to change it via the right and proper way… through a constitutional convention. I hope and wish that my New Year’s Wish List would come true in 2007.

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