Politicians without forward visions and lemon cars

I love old songs. There was this song by Trini Lopez that goes: “Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet but the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat”.

Today, there is this thing called a lemon car. A car is a lemon when it fails the expectation of its owner in many aspects. Notwithstanding its brilliant finish, advanced engine, and rigid quality control, a lemon car just suffers one flaw after another as soon as it drives out of the showroom.

Considering that carmakers use computers, it is rare to find a lemon car such that perplexed manufacturers do not have any explanation beyond Murphy’s Law.

In politics, there are leaders who can be equated to lemon cars because they lack forward programs. Our duty as citizens is to search and quantify projects undertaken by officials that are more visionary than reactionary. On this parameter, and even amidst the chuckles from die-hard Osmeñistas in our city, I dare label Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña as a lemon. Here is why.

We elected Osmeña in 1988. This was 30 years ago, minus the brief Alvin Garcia and Michael Rama interludes. Yet look at the monumental failure of the city to adopt an efficient solid waste disposal system. We see increasing mounds of waste for days before garbage trucks pick them up. Even the millions the city government paid to Osmeña’s political ally these last several months did not dent the problem. The city under his leadership did not anticipate the need for a landfill, Cebu City pales in comparison to Bayawan City, Negros Oriental, which has an efficient waste disposal system, capped by its construction of a sanitary landfill. Those who doubt this claim can cross the Tañon Strait and marvel at Bayawan’s facility.

We, Cebuanos, suffer horrendous traffic jams every day. When Osmeña became mayor 30 years ago, I could drive from my home in Barangay Kasambagan to my Law office near the University of San Carlos in 10 minutes. Today, I spend at best 45 minutes travelling same four kilometers. An economic article I read recently placed our losses due to traffic to hundreds of millions daily. We can all shout that traffic woes are a worldwide scourge, but if we all agree a solution to gridlocks is new roads, then we can also agree the city, mostly under Osmeña, who has not opened a new road in his entire watch, is a total failure.

I am compelled to write on these two (of the many) glaring administrative failures of Osmeña because in his last state-of-the-city address, he was unable to cite a carefully laid out long-term health program. Instead he exposed to us, quite unwittingly, his paucity of visionary ideas. He dangled a lemon flower consisting of his program for long life. To him, it was a newly-found gem after three decades of governance. By nurturing the imagination of those afflicted with diabetes and similar ailments, he thought that he could blur our minds that few years ago, apropos to his lack of a viable long-term plan to meet the health demands of his constituencies, he wanted to sell the Cebu City Medical Center that serviced thousands of our city’s poor families. If the health interest of the city’s poor occupied his mind, did the mayor set a foreseeable future time when the city hospital may be reopened? Nah!