EDITORIAL - A ghost that haunts Cebuanos

The City Traffic Operations Management has started removing the decorative lampposts used in the staging of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Summit in 2007. Days after getting the go-signal from the Ombudsman, Citom personnel rushed to uproot the lampposts uselessly dotting Salinas Drive.

In the coming days, it is expected that the city streets will be free from all ASEAN Summit lampposts. Citom chairman Jack Jakosalem said it was just right to remove them as their presence hurts the image of the city. 

Aside from being “symbol of corruption,” Jakosalem said the lampposts have become ugly as they are no longer functional. Of the 685 lampposts installed in four of the city’s streets, eight were found missing during an inventory conducted by the Ombudsman and the Commission on Audit.

The lamppost issue has become one of the most controversial graft cases to hit Cebu. It still haunts those who are implicated, including local officials and regional public works executives. 

In efforts to beautify Metro Cebu for the ASEAN Summit, hundreds of lampposts were installed in the cities of Cebu, Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu. But their purchase was the subject of Ombudsman investigation after it found out that their prices were bloated 10 times the original costs.

Now what was supposed to give a pleasant view to visiting heads of states during the summit had turned into a ghost haunting Cebuanos, a specter that has greatly tainted the successful hosting of the event. 

What adds more embarrassment to the issue is that those lampposts have become eyesores because they no longer serve their main purpose of lighting up the streets. Instead, they now stand as a disgusting proof of how corruption massively perpetrated government offices.

But no amount of effort to get rid of the lampposts can erase the fact that corruption had played a significant role in the summit. Those pieces of decoration will continue to remind Cebuanos of the hundreds of millions in taxpayers’ money that had gone down the drain.