Skewed priorities and vested interests

While waiting for a couple of big bangs widely expected to rock the national political scene but which appear to be taking their own sweet time to happen, let us go back to a local issue in Cebu whose own resolution ought to have long arrived but which has instead dragged because of the main protagonists' intransigence in not doing what is correct, moral, and fair as demanded of leaders by their constituents.

I am talking about the multi-billion-peso reclamation project in Consolacion that the son-and-mother municipal leadership appears bent on ramming through despite growing multi-sectoral protests, incontrovertible threats to the environment as warned by experts, among them Dr. Filipinas Sotto, hard economic dislocation of affected businesses and tragic loss of jobs and livelihood by hapless residents already reeling from the pandemic.

For months now, Mayor Joannes Alegado and his mother Vice Mayor Teresa Alegado have been pushing a 200-hectare-plus reclamation project in partnership with a private consortium that is being dubbed Seafront City and envisioned to bring economic boon to the municipality. All things being equal, maybe it will and maybe it will not. What is certain is that a huge price will have to be paid by those standing in the way of big development.

Compassion and humaneness ought never to be divorced from leadership. In fact, in tandem with vision and resolve, compassion and humaneness ought to be leadership's hallmarks. They ought to be the vanguard ensuring leadership success. Any pretender to leadership devoid of such qualities are pygmies on the stage and do not deserve the lofty places they arrogate unto themselves, and for which they demand obedience and respect.

What is unsettling is that instead of facing the issues squarely, the Consolacion town leadership would rather resort to the devious and hackneyed trick of ascribing ill motives on those opposed to the project on legitimate grounds. According to the Alegados, those seeking to block the project have vested interests in their opposition and are only out to discredit the local government. The Alegados apparently wear only rose-tinted glasses.

I wonder if they can hear their own selves talking. But as any casual observer will tell you, it is those aggressively pushing the project despite the clear disadvantages, tragic losses, and potentially destructive consequences who can only have any vested interests in the project. Without vested interests, any leader with a heart will immediately forego any promise of gain in favor of living and breathing human lives that are in peril of being lost.

But how has the leadership of Consolacion invested itself in the interest of its living and breathing constituents? Sad to say it does not have a very proud record to display. Even without dredging for historical evidence of neglect and skewed priorities, just a few days of rain and floods already tell volumes of failure by that leadership to put its priorities in order.

Rains do not ambush mankind. They come usually on time. There is such a thing as a science to climate. Good leaders know what to expect and act accordingly. But if the Consolacion leadership, after years of being at the helm, still cannot solve the much simpler problem of flooding, how can anyone trust their word on a reclamation project that has even more worrisome portents of destruction than just a dark cloud presaging rain?

Flooding is an environmental problem, just as are the many other problems enumerated by the many experts who have lent their voices to those opposed to the reclamation project. It now appears that the Consolacion leadership is not so hot on the environment. It appears that there are other priorities to which its attention is geared. It seems its interest is invested somewhere else. And it takes no expert to know where.