Palace pal blocking Manila harbor rehab

Manila’s North Harbor is not just an eyesore; it’s a symbol of decay. Ships disgorge passengers onto the same platforms as hogs and harvest. Terminals and office buildings are stinky and decrepit. Vendors hawk wares everywhere except at their designated stalls. Con artists abound, tricking newly arrived seasick provincials to part with lifetime savings. If vehicular traffic is chaotic, more so is cargo handling. Hardly mechanized, filling or emptying a ship’s hold takes three to four unruly days. Worse are things not readily seen. Underwater structures are fast weakening. Decades of trash from nearby slums have settled thick beneath the shallow waters.

Clearly the seaport needs modernizing. A blueprint had been drawn as far back as 1999 in fact. It calls for a private concessionaire to plunk in P10 billion in three years to erect a world-class facility. Central of the work naturally would be to dredge the seabed, level and rebuild terminals, install load on-load off gear and roll on-roll off bays. To boost shipping, loading and unloading must thence take only half the day. The idea is to make seamless trade connections between Luzon and the world, secure for passengers and cargo, housing 5,000 dockworkers. On top of construction costs, the concessionaire is to pay the Philippine Ports Authority P6.5 billion over the 25 years that it manages the complex. It is also to reimburse PPA P130 million in advances to consultants and labor benefits. PPA is to retain sovereign power to levy port, wharfage and usage fees. All improvements are to become PPA property at the end of the 25-year franchise. Most important, the concessionaire must win in a public bidding for the lowest charges to port users.

So how come such a good plan has not been enforced? Here’s why: a presidential crony is blocking it, after backing out of the bidding.

Sources at the PPA say the brass is under tremendous pressure from the Palace pal to shelve the modernization. Legal machinations and media snow jobs have been employed. Scarier were calls by legislator-friends of the crony to go slow on the bidding, or else face sanctions like budget cuts.

 The crony is out to protect vested interest. He occupies a large part of North Harbor but pays so little for it. He had initially opted to move out of the ports and shipping business, and so backed out of the 2007 bidding for the modernization. But when things fell through, he decided to stay. Since then he has been throwing hurdle after hurdle at the remaining eligible bidder, a joint venture of Harbour City Inc. and Metro Pacific Corp. It’s so Philippine, like a local politico keeping constituents poor, so reliant on and blindly reelecting him.

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Filipinos are adept at mobilizing the public for worthwhile causes. In 2003 the DepEd began repairing schoolhouses bayanihan-style. Led by barangay and school officials, parents brought hammers and nails, paint and brushes, mops and pails on the last weekend of summer break to fix up their kids’ classrooms. The volunteerism accounted for, and government saved, P550 million in maintenance costs. The following two years did even better.

Successes must be replicated; it’s the best way to teach lessons. If last Saturday’s Earth Hour was a hit with Filipinos, it’s due to tireless teaching of environmentalists about global warming. This was only the second time that Filipinos joined the eighth yearly hour-long lights out, but RP was the biggest joiner among 84 countries. That’s because the country, according to surveys, has the highest mass awareness of climate change. A problem was that Filipinos don’t know how to fight it. Earth Hour was the start of their education that something can be done after all. Now there’s a proposal for monthly lights-out on the full moon, with public info drives on recycling, segregation and composting. That should work.

It’s true what Irving Berlin said: the toughest thing about being a success is that you got to keep on being a success. That’s why the other weekend’s huge anti-drug demonstration too must be repeated. An estimated 600,000 schoolchildren, parents, teachers and state employees marched the entire length of Roxas Boulevard in Manila-Pasay to make a strong statement: no to drugs. The Batang Iwas Droga (BIDA) grand rally merited an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first and largest of its kind. More important, it made youngsters learn early on the dangers of drug use. Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. boss Efraim Genuino, a BIDA supporter who thought of the event, now has a challenge to organize bigger events. Known for dreaming big, like an Entertainment City at the Manila Bay reclamation, Genuino can also take the rallies to university towns like Dagupan, Baguio, Cebu, Iloilo, and Davao.

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