A very happy New Year to all our readers!
It's the first day of 2018 and we all hope that this year will be a better one than 2017. For the past 17 years we've had our talkshow Straight from the Sky, we always have a tradition to have as our first guest of the year a person of importance for our televiewers and the Cebuanos. So for 2018, it is my honor and privilege to bring you for the first time on my talkshow, Presidential Assistant for the Visayas Michael Lloyd Dino whom I never had the opportunity to interview.
He and I go a long way, playing golf once a week at the Cebu Country Club and treating each other to dinner for important discussions. But now that he is the Presidential Assistant for the Visayas, we no longer hold dinners because understandably he is a very busy person. But I brought him to your TV screens because I expect that 2018 is a crucial year for us Cebuanos as many of the infrastructure projects that were denied to Cebu during the reign of former president PNoy Aquino III will be starting this year.
More importantly, 2018 is the year before the 2019 mid-term elections; therefore there will be a lot of jockeying for positions in this year. So watch Presidential Assistant Michael Dino tonight on SkyCable's channel 53 at 8 p.m. with replays on Wednesday and Saturday same time and channel. We also have replays on MyTV's channel 30 at 9 p.m. Monday and at 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. on Wednesday and Friday.
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As a columnist, it has been my personal tradition to use the first column of the year as my personal "Wish List" or "Dream List" of things that hopefully will come true for this New Year. So the first to come to my mind to wish for this coming year is for Cebuanos to be more courteous especially when driving. I make this first on my list as it would lead to my other wishes, that hopefully traffic in Cebu will return back to sanity.
By this, I wish that Metro Cebu or MEGA Cebu will conduct a province-wide traffic summit where all traffic departments of component cities would air out their issues, challenges, or complaints so that we can all find solutions to the traffic mess we ourselves create. If Singapore, which is a small island, smaller than Cebu, can do a master traffic plan and keep traffic to a minimum, I don't see any reason why we Cebuanos cannot fix our own traffic mess? We have enough bright boys in this town to solve our problems. Perhaps all we need is political will to implement this proposal.
The root of our problems lies in the unitary form of governance that we have been under since the implementation of the 1935 Constitution. When we changed our Constitution in 1973 and later in 1987, the framers of our constitution only genuflected to the altar of Imperial Manila. Yes, this includes former Supreme Court chief justice Hilario Davide Jr. who continues to badmouth a Federal system of governance.
I don't have enough space to write the whole benefits of Federalism, which we can see in 25 countries like the United States of America, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, India, and Malaysia or roughly 40 percent of the world's population. This is why people who write lies about a federal state (like that writer who wrote that Federalism can produce warlordism) are giving a disservice to Filipinos ignorant of the federal form of government. They should educate our people rather than mislead them.
A case in point is Germany, which after the debacle of World War I had the weak Weimar Republic, which was taken over by the Nazis. But after the devastation of Germany during World War II, Germany finally adopted a Federal form of government and ever since, Germany has become the most stable nation in Europe.
One major benefit of Federalism is the Office of the Ombudsman will be broken into federal states and we don't have to wait for one person in Imperial Manila to file cases against corrupt government officials. So we wish that for 2018, we can adopt a Federal form of government.
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