Sugbuak and Congressman Simeon Kintanar

When I learned that Congressman Simeon Kintanar authored a bill creating a province out of the second congressional district of Cebu, I could hardly believe it. But I told myself, perhaps he had a strong reason for doing so. It turned out that his reason was the usual reason geography wreckers use: Development. The theory is that if you divide a political unit into smaller ones governance would improve, hence development can be fast-tracked.

Having been a former NEDA executive, Congressman Kintanar has a lot up his sleeves on the subject of development. He knows what forces drive the wheels of progress and what impede them. His is not mere armchair expertise because his exposure to field work is extensive. During Eddie Gullas' term as governor of Cebu, Kintanar was one of his development consultants. Those were years of exciting ventures on major infrastructure projects, including the monumental Central Visayas Regional Project, the precursor of the Metropolitan Cebu Development Project. In other projects such as those having to do with water resource development, rural electrification, environmental improvement, Kintanar was in the thick of them all not only in planning but also in implementation.

Such extensive experience in local government development must have been the basis of Kintanar's Sugbuak initiative. Chop up and build up, seems to be his idea of social improvement. Is this workable? There's a school of thought that believes in consolidation, not partition, as a development strategy. Former president Ramos' East Asian Growth Area (EAGA) is one example. PGMA's super-regions concept is another. Both strategies have their own plus and minus points. Given certain conditions one approach can work wonders but not always because there have been partitioned provinces that have remained moribund. Will Kintanar's Cebu del Sur idea, if realized, become a catalyst for progress?

Progress indeed is the fairyland call for the 15 towns in the second district of Cebu. Nine of them are fifth class municipalities, the rest are either third or fourth class. Sparsely populated (average population per 2000 census: 30,000), most of them squat on barren mountain terrain where corn crops can grow only a little higher than your knees. Per capita income is way below poverty line, and except for government employees and small-time entrepreneurs in town centers, most people eke out a living as marginal farmers or fishermen. Food shortage is a perennial problem, more so in interior areas where many people subsist at times only on root crops and other food substitutes.

This is Kintanar's country and Sugbuak is his road map for progress. Some whistle-blowers have accused the Congressman and his divide-Cebu colleagues of delusion, saying that immediacy of governance is not all there is to social progress. Availability of resources and investment money plus the presence of skilled manpower are more critical factors, they say. Others take him to task as a self-serving innovator driven by the obsession to stay in power.

But what is the alternative to Sugbuak? I am from one of those towns and I have seen the faces of poverty in the haggard look and deformed bodies of the mountain-folk there. Government after government has come and gone but the goblin of want and privation has stayed. Whence is their epiphany of the good life? Could it be Cebu del Sur?

Like the other Sugbuak proponents, Sim Kintanar has been the target of spiteful remarks. But whatever they say of him I still believe the Congressman from Argao is a well-intentioned fellow whose desire to do the best for the greatest number of people cannot be questioned. For more than six years in the early eighties we worked together at the Cebu capitol and I found him sincere, competent, and outwardly in concern.

Later when I was at DepEd regional office he served, gratis et amore, as guru on Christian values among my rank and file personnel, conducting for three years a one-hour weekly session. Under his guidance we learned much about Jesus and the Scriptural truths that have inspired people to live in the spirit of the Lord.

An Opus Dei worker, Congressman Kintanar believes in St. Josemaria Escriva's teaching which says: "Sanctify work and it will sanctify you and others". Is Cebu del Sur Kintanar's way of sanctifying himself and taga-salot?

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