The FREEMAN celebrates its 100th year!

It’s been 30 years since I embarked on a new journey of my life, to be a journalist. My late mentor, The Philippine STAR publisher and columnist Maximo V. Soliven agreed with the late Juanito Jabat, publisher of The FREEMAN, to ask me to do a column for this newspaper. It wasn’t the best of times as another newspaper nearly decimated the rank and file of The FREEMAN to the point that a friend of mine asked me “Why are you joining a newspaper that is like a sinking ship?”

Thirty years later, The FREEMAN is still as strong as it was decades ago and only a handful of newspapers in this nation can boast reaching a hundred years. In those 30 years that have passed, Cebu witnessed the opening and closing of so many newspapers, but by the grace of God, The FREEMAN has continued its operation all the way to its centenary. I’m not saying that in all those years, we never experienced any problems, but if there is one thing that I must say about being with The FREEMAN it is that its editorial staff and the Gullas Family always gave me editorial independence, something I’ve always been proud of as other newspapers cannot do likewise.

So we mark this centenary in simple humility that God showered us with the gifts of communication even up to our ageing years. Thirty years as a journalist is a long time for an ordinary person. But apparently, we just didn’t stop being in the newspapers. Next year, I will be celebrating my 20th year as a host in one of the longest television talk shows in Cebu, an accomplishment that we have achieved and will celebrate next year. But today, we are tasked to help The FREEMAN bask in its centenary limelight. After all, it is truly a rare opportunity to continue with The FREEMAN especially in this new age of modernity and technology. Congratulations to The FREEMAN and its editorial staff and to Sir Dodong Gullas and his family, and to Sir Miguel Belmonte and the Star Group of Companies who partnered with The Freeman. Congratulations!

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While Mayor Edgar Labella said that the city’s contract with garbage hauler Jomara Konstruckt Corp. ends this Saturday, July 20, and without any new contracts for collecting our garbage in Cebu City, a garbage crisis will definitely happen in Cebu City. So while the city can continue collecting trash from the streets and households even without Jomara, it will only be a matter of time before the transfer station in Inayawan will be filled. Mind you, this situation just didn’t appear out of the blue; we already had a crisis situation in the last few weeks of the Osmeña administration.

So it really is now up to Mayor Labella if he allows this situation to deteriorate further. What needs to be done is to call for emergency measures to prevent a worsening situation. So we expect that all Cebu City councilors, regardless of political affiliation, to work together and solve this problem. Again, allow me to remind our political leaders that today’s situation came about because of lack of focus on our garbage situation. So it’s really a matter of focusing on the issues that make this problem at least solvable temporarily. But in the long run, I expect our political leader to find a more permanent solution to our garbage crisis.

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Another problem that Cebu City has to solve in the long term is our looming water crisis. Yes, we know too well that Metro Cebu has a lot of condominiums and high-rise buildings being constructed by Manila-based companies, so the first question is where will these new condominiums get their water? We know too well that Metro Cebu doesn’t any surface water sources that we could tap. It’s been a while since I interviewed officials of Metropolitan Cebu Water District, so I believe it is time for me to check out our water issues.

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We just learned that the world's most powerful and notorious criminal, Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was sentenced to life imprisonment in New York City. This is the punishment El Chapo, the 62-year-old former co-leader of Mexico's mighty Sinaloa drug cartel, was convicted of in February in US federal court for a spate of charges, including smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana into the US. Now how many thousands were killed by El Chapo? Why don’t we ask him?