EDITORIAL - What our traffic woes say about leadership

Land traffic between Cebu and Mactan, and between Cebu City and the north, has not gone from bad to worse. It has become virtually impossible. And that is because nobody cared to plan for the consequences of repairs on the Mandaue-Mactan Bridge and road projects in Mandaue City. And this despite such activities having repeatedly been postponed since August.

It is not that the bridge repairs and road projects crept upon everyone like a thief in the night. They did not take everyone by surprise. They did not come unannounced. They were scheduled activities that were announced in August but had to be repeatedly postponed in favor of a number of important international activities that Cebu was hosting.

That the postponements started way back in August should have given ample time for the concerned authorities to plan ahead and map out strategies to cushion the impact of the bridge repairs and road rehabilitation projects. From the whole of August until the end of January is a good six months of preparation had officials taken the opportunity to do so.

The impossibility of traffic now in the affected areas is a direct result of misplaced priorities and misappreciation of facts by such officials. Apparently, nobody decided to place to the fore the inevitable fact that, regardless of how many times the projects had to be postponed, the time will still come when they could no longer be postponed.

In other words, the time will come when everybody will have to face the music. Given such inevitability, it would have helped if in the six long months before the music was to have started, all those involved did a little practicing on how to dance. Unfortunately, nobody did, or at least nobody did with the sense of urgency that the impending situation required.

And so, the inevitable is upon us. Things can no longer be postponed any further. Everybody has to face the music even if nobody knows the dance. Officials are now scrambling to think of things to do about the situation. They are thinking of things to improvise, things to develop as they go along. To be sure, some things can be be coaxed from difficult situations. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention.

But as everyone knows, that is not exactly representative of inspired leadership and good governance. What Cebuanos need of their leaders, who love to invoke global ideals, is the capacity to think and plan ahead, to lay down situations before they actually happen and prepare appropriate responses that can be implemented at a moment's notice. In an election year, this is what is demanded of aspiring leaders and leaders who need to reinvent themselves.