The private sector and a fond farewell to Nyor Carl

Jobers Bersales

In last week’s column, I mentioned that Mega Cebu, or more properly, the Metro Cebu Development and Coordinating Board (MCDCB), has in fact an urbanization plan.

Prepared by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), it is designed to address the gaps, the incoherence, in Metro Cebu’s urbanization during the last three decades. Called Mega Cebu Roadmap 2050, it is the result of a JICA Team Study that was released in 2015.

It is anchored on a vision of what Metro Cebu should look like in the year 2050.

Parts of this road map, which are divided in to seven sub-roadmaps, which, if you permit me to recall, are as follows: competitiveness enhancement: smart South Road Properties development; metropolitan governance; water supply; storm waste management; wastewater management; solid waste management; urban structure and land use and, finally, highway network and public transport.

Judging from the opinion columns in the different newspapers last week, it is the last sub-road map that hits everyone right in the guts.

Why? Because rich or poor, we all go through the madness of traffic every day—well, except for Sunday but only before 5 pm because from 5 p.m. onwards of lonely, quiet Sunday, a large chunk of those living in the outlying towns of Cebu province return to work in Metro Cebu.

On Sunday evenings, thus, the traffic begins to snarl anew as if to remind us all of what awaits us the following morning and so on until the cycle of madness begins again the next Sunday evening.

Everything is well on the way of getting into the feasibility study stages but, as with everything that seems to pull this country down just when it begins to rise the ladder of success, politics reared its ugly head.

The change in political leadership in at least one city has not necessarily derailed the transport sub-roadmap but the resulting clash, more personal than substantial, have slowed its actualization somewhat.

The personal has simply become political, especially when it comes to two power blocs, one local and the other national.

Be that as it may, I am glad that the development framework for Metro Cebu 2050 remains on stream.

I believe the reason behind this is, as I stated clearly in my previous column, the active participation of the private sector. Government will always be, well, government: building infrastructure, addressing other needs of constituencies, and spending revenues generated for every given year.

Designed supposedly as an objective entity, a non-thinking automaton with a pre-programed work plan, governments and their bureaucracies are unfortunately prone to the whims and caprices of whoever is sitting at its apex or top.

And thus it gets swayed to and fro—one of the patent imperfections of democracy.

It is only the citizenry, the private individuals living their private lives but going through public spaces and public services that can whip this automaton online again so that it follows its pre-programed work plan.

Where one finds an acquiescent private sector in the midst of chaotic and unplanned development, there you find a city or a town sinking in what I described last week as a quicksand.

It is the private sector that will eventually pull that town or city up and away from the quicksand.

And why should the private sector do so?

Because government can only exist with the taxes paid for by nothing else but the private sector.

The private sector therefore has every right to question where its taxes go and whether this will make life better for all—the supposed ultimate goal of every government bureaucracy since time immemorial.

* * *

Allow me this space to digress a bit and say my farewell to a dear friend and colleague in the heritage family of Cebu, the late Msgr. Carlito Pono, who passed away suddenly last Saturday.

Nyor, as I would fondly call him, was the founding chair of the Cebu Archdiocesan Commission for the Cultural Heritage of the Church (ACCH), appointed by his eminence, the late Ricardo Cardinal Vidal in 2004.

When the rectory was inaugurated as the Cebu Cathedral Museum (now the Cebu Archdiocesan Museum or ACM) on November 26, 2006, Nyor became its founding curator.

I was approached by heritage architect and ACCH colleague, Arct. Melva Rodriguez-Java, to design the galleries of the museum, which marked the beginning of many jolly encounters with him over the years.

At our ACCH meetings, he was our sole and soul provider, leading the prayer and then paying for meals while patiently and quietly listening to our tirades against well-intentioned but misguided priests tinkering on the heritage churches assigned to them.

It was his task to go to these priests and gently remind them of their iniquities—something that must have been very difficult for him as some were known to him even in seminary days.

Not once did he raise his voice nor did he tell us to stop our chest-beating and lamentations against the damage done to churches.

When I first broached the idea of publishing the book, “Balaanong Bahandi: Sacred Treasures of the Archdiocese of Cebu,” he readily agreed as did my colleagues in the ACCH who became our co-authors/photographers (Louella Alix, Trizer Dale Mansueto, Melva Java, Mary Frances Despi, Carlos Apuhin, etc.).

On a more personal note, it was he who helped me obtain the permission of Cardinal Vidal to excavate at the grounds of Boljoon Church and Convent and also at the San Remigio Parish Church.

It is probably the first time that church grounds were studied archaeologically with permission also from the National Museum since the Sta. Ana Church excavations in Manila of the 1960s.

This I shall forever be personally indebted to both him and the Cardinal.

Go with God now, Nyor. You have earned your rest.