ODA in Cebu Revisited (Part 1 of 2)

If one has been here in Cebu in the last 30 years, Cebu City in particular, you would have noticed that there are some distinct developments that stand out, both by their mere size and cost but especially by the source of its funding. Public sector projects, the ones that serve the people in general, are funded out of three general sources; government funding out of internal revenue, private sector financing through Public-Private-Partnerships (PPP), and loans and grants --in aid coming from foreign sources. The latter is called Official Development Assistance, or ODA.

The first source is what we call the government budget. These are either national or local, the former called the General Appropriations Act or GAA, the latter being the local annual budget of each province, city, or municipality. ODA are the loans and grants from two groups of foreign sources; bilateral ones from other governments (like JICA, USAID, etc.), and multilateral aid from international financing agencies like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB). Private financing is arranged under the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) Law or Joint Venture (JV) Ordinances.

When one traverses the roads of Cebu, the old ones will still remember that V. Rama and B. Rodriguez are different from what they were before; that there was a time there was no South Bus Terminal or North Bus Terminal for that matter, or the markets in Talisay and Mandaue. Those were part of the Metro Cebu Development Project Phases 1 and 2. If you remember the old Imus Road, you will have cringed at the thought of passing there. And the Mactan Circumferential Road was part and parcel of that package, together with Patalinghug Avenue.

In 1990, Typhoon Ruping struck Cebu with a fury, effectively disabling the first (only one at that time) Mandaue-Mactan Bridge. JICA supplied the ODA loan for the construction of the second (now called Marcelo Fernan) bridge, funded in 2005 and finished in 2009. What is peculiar in many of these projects is that these were locally initiated, and the entire process needed the painstaking work of local officials. Having an ODA project passed through the NEDA Investment Coordinating Committee (NEDA-ICC) is not a joke, and fortunately, Cebu City had former Mayor Tommy Osmeña take up the cudgels for the job then.

Osmeña’s advantage, I think, on hindsight, is because he studied the entire thing. I don’t think there was any other local government official who has mastered the entire NEDA-ICC process from beginning to end and get approvals for their projects. And he attended all the NEDA-ICC meetings for Cebu projects from start to end. I attended a lot of these meetings. It really pays to hear a proponent defend their projects and make a good argument why these would be good for their constituents. Mayors of lesser spine would cringe and make excuses for not attending. Well, most wouldn’t even have the talent to submit a single project in the first place, much more attend meetings.

It’s Cebu’s fortune to have gotten a lot of these ODA projects. We’ll try to discuss a few of them next week. (To be continued)