Suffering bad traffic in A.S. Fortuna… help!

Last Wednesday morning I interviewed Andrew Harrison, Chief Executive Officer of GMR-Megawide that operates the Mactan-Cebu International Airport, as the first guest on my special presentation on my talkshow on Straight from the Sky for 2019. From my house to the airport it took only an hour, but the return trip was two hours! My trip to the airport meant I had to pass by A.S. Fortuna Avenue.

This brings me to pose a question to the folks living in Mandaue City who are having an election for local officials next year. Every time I pass by A.S. Fortuna Avenue I experience traffic jams in major intersections of the road. The first intersection is the one along Hernan Cortes Street and the second one is along the Mandaue Highway intersection with A.S. Fortuna Avenue. Which has vehicles at least a kilometer into the road, where chances are, you end up swallowing three red signal lights before you exit this road.

My question to Mandauehanons is: Is suffering daily bad traffic acceptable to you? For the last 10 years you have suffered through this neglect either by the local government or the national government. Yesterday was a good example; in the morning traffic along A.S. Fortuna Avenue was bad along H. Cortes and the Mandaue Highway, but as we went back in the afternoon the traffic had turned from bad to horrible. But what I find unacceptable is the attitude of Mandauehanons to have their politicians let them suffer this daily bad traffic because they cannot even find ways to construct flyovers along H. Cortes and another one along the Mandaue Highway.

I have been asking the politicians of Mandaue for the past 10 years for two flyovers along A.S. Fortuna Avenue. No one offered a solution to help not just the people of Mandaue City stop their daily suffering through bad traffic. With local elections in the offing, let us hear from the politicians from both political camps what they plan to do to ease the bad traffic along A.S. Fortuna Avenue. If I don’t hear from anyone after this column is printed, it means that the up-and-coming politicians asking for Mandauehanons to vote for them have no plan to solve this ugly traffic problem that happens along that major road every single day.

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The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas reported that cash remittances from millions of Overseas Filipino Workers in the Middle East are down by $1 billion or P53 billion. This is the total amount of money OFWs send home between January and October this year which fell to $5.43 billion from $6.46 billion last year. If I remember correctly, this is the first time in a very long time that we’ve heard that this figure had gone down and at least by a billion. It is probably due to the fact that monies are no longer sent back to the Philippines or maybe some OFWs are no longer earning the same amount that they used to.

The BSP said that transfers from Saudi Arabia were down by 11.1 percent, Kuwait by 18.2 percent, Bahrain by 9.6 percent and from the United Arab Emirates by 11.1 percent. What could be happening here? Earlier, Representative John Bertiz of the party-list group ACTS-OFW, the lone representative in Congress of Filipino workers abroad, said the decrease in OFW fund transfers from Saudi Arabia – which hosts the largest number of OFWs – is due to “Saudization.” “Saudization simply means that certain job openings in Saudi Arabia previously available to foreigners, including Filipinos, may no longer be there because these are now being reserved for Saudi nationals,” he said.

But while this is partly true, the reality is that Saudi Arabia is still one of the major sources of remittances, which have totaled $1.662 billion in the first nine months of 2018. Perhaps what we ought to do is look for other markets in ASEAN for Filipinos. This is a lesson that we can no longer rely on the Middle East market and should look at other countries where we can benefit from fund transfers. Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and many other countries are already booming for Filipino workers. I’m sure that counties like Italy or Spain also have Filipino OFWs!

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