When Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña hosted a lunch for journalists last Thursday at the Japan Seafarers Union-Philippine Seafarers Union building at the waterfront area, he had one thing in mind — to take his running feud with Governor Gwen Garcia in a new direction.
The mayor wanted to show the journalists that a beautiful and functional building can be built for so much less — P160 million — than it took to build the Cebu International Convention Center, which took all of P800 million to construct.
Aside from the journalists, the mayor also invited representatives from the Office of the Ombudsman and the Commission on Audit so they can “spot the differences” between the two buildings.
Either they mayor thinks he is smarter than his guests, or he thinks his guests are gullible enough to take him at his word at the cost of a lunch. For the comparison he wanted to portray just does not exist.
The differences he sees between the two buildings exist only in a polluted mind, and a polluted mind cannot be trusted to lay everything in perspective so that the guests can come to an informed opinion about what the mayor parades before their eyes.
And if the guests, woefully, saw only the difference in cost in accordance with what the mayor had intended them to see, then the mayor was probably right on the dot in hosting them to a lunch.
We are willing to bet that only very few of the guests, if at all, saw the futility of the exercise, that they were being made to compare two buildings when in fact there was no basis to make any comparison — whether in cost, design, or purpose.
For whatever may be the purpose or purposes in constructing the JSU-PSU building, it is very evident that hosting the heads of state and ministers of all Asean countries and their dialogue partners, as well as hundreds of foreign journalists, was not one of them.
For sure Osmeña never brought up that fact with his guests. All he bragged about was that the building had airconditioning and two elevators. Nobody is disputing that. This is not intended to demean the building, but would the mayor host an Asean Summit in it?