Traffic disaster

No less than Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama minced no words by calling the chaotic traffic along the Banilad-Talamban corridor a disaster, a calamity. Living in one of the subdivisions near the University of San Carlos-Talamban Campus, I certainly agree  with him as I’m sure also those living along the eight-kilometer stretch of Gov. Cuenco Avenue and even way out starting in Pit-os down to the flyover near Ayala Center.

But I also cannot help but agree with one social media commentator who said that the problem lies with jeepneys who ply this route, much as I pity these drivers who need to earn a living. The problem, time and again, Mayor, is that this country insists on letting the private sector carry out a public mass transit system. While getting the private sector to do its share is good, what the pundits in economics and urbanization theory meant was a single or conglomerated block of private sector investors running a mass transit system with drivers paid on a monthly basis, not thousands of persons owning a jeepney or two each plying the streets to eke out a daily wage from passenger intake. That is a formula for disaster. Each owner will privatize public roads by loading and unloading passengers anywhere because the other jeepeneys running towards it from behind is a potential rival for earnings or revenue. This is compounded more by the teeming mass of ill-disciplined taxi drivers who do the same. Why not follow the rest of the modern world where passengers can only ride and alight from identified taxi stands and not just about anywhere they please?

Speaking of disasters, I invite the public to view the aptly titled “Exhibition of Japanese Sustainable Emergency Shelter for Disasters,” which was inaugurated the other night at Museo Parian sa Sugbu courtesy of the Visayan Association of Museums and Galleries Inc. and the Japan Foundation Exhibitions Abroad Program. The exhibit was prepared by Dr. Juan Jimenez of the University of Shiga and VAMGI President Audrey Dawn Tomada, curator of the Jose R. Gullas Halad Museum, together with Museo Parian and Ho Tong Hardware proprietor Jimmy Sy and curator Tony Abelgas. There are 21 panels of exhibition material, including models of shelters and community centers that were designed and built by 21 architects together with their students from various Japanese universities. These were all built following the Great East Japan earthquake of 2011, which we remember because of the greater Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown.

The exhibition aims to highlight the cooperation between students and the communities where they built these shelters although, as elicited from the audience, the context of building emergency shelters is a bit different in the Philippines. I invite everyone to view the exhibits which will run until July 31 after which it will move in month-long exhibitions to the Cathedral Museum of Cebu and then to the JRG Halad Museum before it will end at Museo Sugbo by October this year.

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The transfer of the Lapu-Lapu statue from  Luneta park to Mactan should be halted. And in this I will probably earn the ire of my good friend Ambeth Ocampo, who was the chair of the National Historical Commission of the Philippines when it announced its disagreement to the presence of the statue in the Luneta which is reserved for our national heroes. I agree that Lapu-Lapu cannot be rightfully claimed as  a Filipino hero simply because there was no  Philippines to speak of when he routed Ferdinand Magellan and 50 or 51 of his men in the famous Battle of Mactan in 1521. But one must also remember that when the revolution against Spain began to gel or even in the reform movement of Indios led by Marcelo del Pilar, Graciano Lopez Jaena, and Jose Rizal in Spain, they recalled the revolts that had earlier created a trail to what they were doing. In a sense therefore, the statue of Lapu-Lapu in the Luneta was the beginning, as it were, of a continuing line of dissent among natives who later became Filipinos following the revolution against Spain.

I would most certainly have wanted a huge statue of Lapu-Lapu, as I mentioned to my good friend Ka Bino Guerrero last year, in front or in the vicinity of the Mactan-Cebu International Airport where his tall presence, armed with a kampilan, should tell tourists and visitors alike to behave while in Cebu, especially amid all these stories of pedophilia and cybersex. But one can make another statue and not get the one in the Luneta. LapuLlapu, in a sense, allows us to claim that the 1896 war of independence was not a spur of the moment by a group of overly enthusiastic Tagalogs but its deepest roots lie in Spain’s initial attempt to conquer Cebu and Mactan nearly 500 years ago.

As we prepare to mark the 500th anniversary of that fateful battle in 2021, will the nation’s capital even commemorate it if they have no Lapu-Lapu statue there?