The first 15 days of the year has gone and already we’ve discovered a lot of the traditional problems that plague this nation year end and year out, without any hope of solution. The first one was the case of attempted bribe allegedly by certain unscrupulous prosecutors of the Department of Justice (DoJ) who have now been asked to go on leave. Rather than leave quietly, they go about wearing red bands, accepting speaking engagements or tv interviews in order to “cleanse” their ranks.
We wish the DoJ and the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) would act in unison because the real enemy is out there, those Drug Lords that will not hesitate to use the money they got from their illicit business to destroy the very fabric of our society. We know that there are many prosecutors and fiscals who are honest, but it is the corrupt that destroys their good name.
What we heard in that Congressional hearing was a prosecutor who was nit-picking or finding fault at the PDEA agents without giving any consideration at the catch of drug pushers they bagged! We need to fight the drug menace where we can fight so we need to paddle our canoes in one direction. We in the media can discern which group is paddling their canoes in the other way. Let’s find solutions to this problem of uniting the government agencies against this cancer of society.
The other problem we face every year since I was a little boy is the poor quality of public infrastructure. Special mention is the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) whose officials by now should be experts in their particular field. Yet, take a good look at the roads we have in Cebu, most of them do not have any sidewalk and are poorly-paved, simply waiting for the seasonal rains to come and the potholes once again reappear. Give me just 1 year to work out how to fix potholes and I can guarantee you that when I’m finished, the only potholes you will ever see again is when you look at the moon using a telescope!
I’m not an engineer, but my 20 years work with the Regional Development Council (RDC-7) taught me how to look at an asphalt road that is deteriorating. Instead of fixing the problem, DPWH merely waits until the “alligator back” road breaks into a pothole or a series of potholes. That means there is no preventive maintenance at the DPWH. The least they can do is change whatever system they are doing…even to the point of creating a Task Force just for potholes. But can our DPWH do this? I don’t know, but we can go by what Albert Einstein once quipped, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
That’s one for road maintenance… but what about those infrastructure problems that needs to be worked on? Again, DPWH has become an expert in giving all sorts of excuses they can find in the dictionary to justify the delays of any project. When Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA) came to Cebu last Monday, she blew her top because of the one-year delay of the North Coastal Road. The same Pres. Arroyo also blew her top against DPWH officials working some years back at the very much delayed Naga-Uling Road. It seems that even when faced with the infamous Presidential temper, DPWH seems callous to make their move.
How much more for us ordinary folk, who often go into road rage that it is taking WTG Construction to finish the side roads of the Banilad Flyover. In construction work, there is no sense of urgency with anyone working in the DPWH, as if they had all the time in the world! There’s still so much infrastructure that needs to be done and for a growing Metropolis like Cebu, no one is even doing any urban planning.
A case in point is the third link from the Cebu mainland to the island of Mactan. Who is doing the planning for this? The old Mactan Bridge needs to be fixed and we already witnessed how bad traffic has become when the old bridge was shut down for just a couple of days work. This gives us some kind of urgency that someone should now be doing the plans to prepare for the implementation of the 3rd link. Who is doing this?
My proposal for the 3rd link is to put a tunnel from the South Road Properties to Cordova because it is not too far and there is no point in putting a 3rd bridge between Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu City and putting all traffic into those already congested areas. It took ten years of planning and eventual construction to finish the Fernan Bridge, that means we must plan now for this 3rd undersea link from Cebu City to Cordova.