Of bridges and national distraction
"Maybe in the years to come, we will see a nation with bridges," says President Rodrigo Duterte during the groundbreaking ceremony of the Cebu-Cordova Link Expressway.
I was monitoring last Thursday the primetime national TV news for any report about the groundbreaking but (as I had expected) Manila media were not about to highlight such a major project as the P28-billion Cebu-Cordova Link Expressway. So while the president talked about bridging the islands in his Cordova speech, primetime national media coverage focused on the ongoing tit-for-tat about Tokhang and "political persecution."
The multi-billion bridge and the trading of barbs on politics and human rights are both worth the primetime news. But it's the latter (conflict), embellished with words that shock or agitate, that stimulates the viewers more (translation: higher ratings, more ad revenues). Something as economically consequential as the building of a multi-billion bridge seems dull and grey material for our Western-oriented and Manila-centric national press.
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Cebuanos look forward to the completion of the Cebu-Cordova Link Expressway by 2020. Aside from promising to significantly improve mobility between Cebu City and Mactan Island, the construction of the 8-kilometer toll bridge indeed shows that our economic fundamentals are now able to support such large infrastructure. As President Duterte said, it is a sign that our gross domestic product is growing.
I will not dwell into the merits or demerits of the build-operate-transfer scheme being adopted to realize this project because I lack data to make any sound argument. I will leave it to the experts to weigh the pros and cons of the build-operate-transfer scheme compared to financing from government coffers or from foreign loans.
In any case, the construction of the Cebu-Cordova Link Expressway should be just one among many big-ticket infrastructure projects that Cebu and the national government must urgently work hard to accomplish. Time is running out for us. According to the Japan International Cooperation Agency, Metro Cebu's population is projected to increase to 3.8 million by 2030 and five million by 2050, which is almost double the 2010 population.
Thus, among the challenges identified by JICA in a study is in the area of mobility. This calls for the building of more roads, bridges and other transport infrastructure. Development planners see this as the only way for Metro Cebu to manage the flow of the projected five million people by 2050 and maintain a robust economy.
Even today for example, the corridor between Naga City and Danao City badly needs an expressway built either near the coastal area or in the interior periphery. At present, travelling from Cebu City directly to any town in northern Cebu requires the long distance commuter to compete with other regular commuters for space on a single highway traversing this corridor. I could lose count of how many gridlocks I have to endure travelling the stretch from Cebu City to Carmen on my way to my hometown in Catmon.
There is no question if we can afford these infrastructure projects in the next 20 years. We can, perhaps not with ready cash now, but with good credit today and in the future. JICA projects Metro Cebu's GDP to rise by 8.3 percent annually between 2010 and 2020 and 7.8 percent annually from 2020 to 2030. By that time, the economy will be large enough to afford a mass rapid transit connecting all the cities and municipalities of Metro Cebu.
I just wish that there is more in today's political bickering and power struggles that can actually contribute to realizing what is needed to be accomplished in the future. If there is none more to such political dynamics, then what the national media obsessively dishes out as primetime news could just be mere entertainment for our overstimulated thoughts than anything else.
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