More than the demolitions

Cebu City Mayor Edgardo Labella and Vice Mayor Michael Rama showed last Saturday what may be done to rehabilitate the city’s rivers and other waterways although a mischievous friend of mine, one who makes it his business to find faults in the noblest of human efforts, said that it was not intended by the mayor and the vice mayor. I do not, of course, agree with my friend’s warped thinking. We saw how Labella and Rama led the entire city government machinery in clearing two of the city’s rivers of reported 70 tons of garbage. The city’s top leaders might not have really intended it, but the fact is that they, by an admittedly innovative brand of leadership, gave substance to the hope that we may soon see fish teeming in our inland waters. This is going to be the expected consequence when the rivers are returned to their pristine nature.

It must have been an imaginary dagger fictionally thrust into the hearts of our mayor and vice mayor when they were apprised that the very day following their extra ordinary efforts to cleanse the Guadalupe River of all kinds of waste, some residents threw their garbage to the cascading water. According to the reports, the culprits were informal settlers. My mischievous friend, who was eventually touched by the super human work of Labella and Rama, vented his acerbic tongue on these garbage throwers. To him, these people are worse than the denizens of the underworld undeserving of the kindness both the mayor and vice mayor are known for. He called them dirty and abusive persons who should be shunned by society and dealt with the hardest permissible sanctions.

Realistically speaking, there is a legal remedy available to the new city administration. This solution is not new, in fact. It has been there all along, although the former local chief executive, for perceptively political considerations, refused to wield this legal relief.

By a happy quirk of circumstances assuming the form of a presidential pronouncement, it has become the perfect timing for Labella and Rama to clear the structures that are unlawfully built on the easements of waterways. With no apparent exceptions, these informal settlers ate the biggest source of swill that are thrown to our rivers and esteros. The pollution of Guadalupe, Mahiga and other rivers is the result of the mindlessness of our fellow Cebuanos who make our river beds their virtual dump site. I do not want to doubt the political will of our city’s newly elected administrators recalling that when Rama sat as our mayor, he already ordered the demolition of these illegal structures only to be hindered by some cases filed in court to stop him from doing what was right.

I like to believe that the Labella-Rama team at the head of our city government is not lacking both in imagination and political will. I am sure that they are profound thinkers and responsible doers. What I have written here is most probably nothing compared to the lavish dreams they have for us. I do this if only to tickle their minds enough to start them in doing what maybe their legacy to us.