Chinatown, Singapore – As if to remind me of our ultimate purpose in coming to Singapore for a full week, I woke up last Monday roaming just around the hotel where we are staying here to see high school students in uniforms accompanied by their teacher, an elderly woman of Indian descent, shouting out instructions on how to inventory and document all the shop houses that make up this bustling, pedestrianized sections of Chinatown in Singapore.
I am here with Cebu heritage advocates, museum curators and anthropology undergraduate as well as graduate students from the University of San Carlos as part of what we call the Cebu-Singapore Heritage Study Tour. (Back in June, I organized this in coordination with Pei Jun Chia of the Singapore National Heritage Board.)
Our trip here began barely two days after Ruel Rigor, the Argao-based quintessential cultural mapping expert of Cebu, and I carried out a one-and-a-half-day training for Danao City’s private and public school teachers and student leaders, immediately followed by another one-and-a-half day training for barangay officials and out-of-school youths.
If there is one city that reminds me of Singapore in the 1960s, it is most probably Danao, poised for growth amid the absence of political bickering that has characterized Cebu City, whose future would be like Singapore’s also if not for the backwardness of self-interested politics. Interestingly, and unlike Singapore back in the 1970s, culture and tourism is in the agenda of Danao City’s development, thanks to Councilor Ivy Durano-Meca who also sits in the Provincial Board.
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With us here in Singapore is Carlos “Caloy” Apuhin of the Bank of the Philippine Islands whose deep love for heritage made him apply for leave just to be here for the first time in this mecca of unparalleled development. Singapore, after all, is the poster boy of economic development sans debilitating political self-interest and corruption that always block any well-meaning attempt at making life more livable in much of Southeast Asia. Caloy told me the other day he now finally understands why I keep on writing about Singapore and referring to it as the model for Cebu.
Riding the state-run Metro Rail Transit and buses here amid lush greenery and endless open spaces in between high-rise public housing facilities has Caloy enthralled. “If only we had less of politics and more unity in moving Cebu forward,” he confided to me last night. After our tour of the Heritage Conservation Centre’s facilities, he blurted,“I am frustrated that we do not have one in Cebu.” Ah, but we can if only our politicians can get their acts together and unite for one goal.
Any Cebuano who comes to Singapore for the first time cannot help but see so much of Cebu in this city-state: its size, its being an island, its lush greenery, and the many Hokkien Chinese all around. And yet so much of Singapore is also so unlike Cebu: the absence of discipline on the streets; garbage strewn all around; the high number of poor and uneducated whose votes can win a visionless candidate.
It takes only slightly over three hours to fly from Cebu to Singapore but the gap between a carefully planned city versus chaotic, knee-jerk, and unplanned one is so obvious.
Imagine Singapore’s revered long-time leader Lee Kuan Yew fighting with his parliament about a drainage master plan and going through endless debates over the budget, public housing, public transport and you will not look further to see why Cebu City, despite its potentials, is having a hard time solving a simple problem like flooding and traffic.
Thankfully, there are other cities like nearby Mandaue or Danao where mayor and council are working together to solve their problems.
There is wisdom in having an opposition in the council to scrutinize the actuations of the chief executive but when such scrutiny is denominated by self-interest and nothing more than to filibuster and oppose anything, then let us stop looking at Singapore as our model of economic development.
We might as well end up like Afghanistan.