EDITORIAL - Good roads are being unnecessarily destroyed

Anyone who has been to Banawa will have to agree it has one of the best paved roads in the city. Anyone who has been to Banawa lately will have to ask: What the hell happened? You see, the road in Banawa that used to be one of the best in the city is no longer. It has been destroyed, but not completely - a portion here has been cracked open, a portion there has been dug up.

Road works normally erupt during election time all over the country. Infrastructure projects have always been a good and generous source of kickbacks that can prove very useful for election purposes. This is why even perfectly good roads like the one in Banawa had to be destroyed just so they can be repaired or replaced, the pretext required to collect.

But there is something else very unique going on in the Banawa project. Most road projects all over the country at this time are being done at least wholesale. Entire stretches of roads are being worked on - they are first torn up and then repaired or replaced. But in Banawa, it is one small piece here and another small piece there.

Anybody who has been to Banawa lately will not be able to differentiate the Banawa road from a quilt. It has become a patchwork of activity that is not even continuous. Sometimes you see people and equipment moving. And then sometimes you don't. The result of such patchwork implementation of this mysterious project is that vehicles are now forced to weave their way in and out of the work areas along this road.

Such a manner of work has given rise to malicious insinuations that maybe, the small patches of work that is being done is all the work that is intended to be done but that the entire stretch of Banawa road will be claimed as covered by the whole project - you know, like doing a little tinkering here and there but then claiming payment for the entire banana.

One can almost cry looking at what is being done to such a fine, beautiful and perfect stretch of road. In the short while that it has been finished, one is hard-pressed to recall a time when the road needed repairs. In other words, the road was healthy. It has no injuries. It had no ailments. It had no problems. Such was its condition it could have stayed that way for many years.

But whoever is behind the destruction, whoever is behind the totally unnecessarily and uncalled for piecemeal piece of shoddy work must have a motive for the waste and the inconvenience. And the perpetrator must be punished. The Office of the Ombudsman, whose offices are just nearby, should take a personal look at Banawa road, as well as all other roads that are being unjustly and unnecessarily destroyed.