Happy New Year 2020 to our readers
It has always been my personal tradition to use the first column of the year as my personal wish list of things that hopefully would come true for the new year. Call this wish also as my personal prayer to those who always read my column. My first prayer is for my The FREEMAN family, from Sir Dodong Gullas, Miguel Belmonte, Bhoy Mendoza, Archie Modequillo, Bryan Padilla, and Jane Rosales and our fellow columnists who appear in this newspaper, to have good health this year.
Knowing that the biggest problem in Cebu is our traffic congestion, the first prayer to come to my mind is to wish for Cebuanos to be more patient and courteous, especially in traffic, as it would make our traffic problems more bearable. Hopefully when the third bridge is complete, traffic in Cebu will return back to sane. As our good friend, Presidential Assistant Michael Dino informed me, the Department of Public Works and Highways has approved my pet project, the parallel road to Escario Street. Hopefully, this infrastructure project will be completed next year. It may not solve our traffic problems happening all over the place but I’m sure it will ease the traffic congestion along Escario Street all the way to Guadalupe!
My other Cebu issue is our serious lack of water, something most Cebuanos only complain about in the summer when the water table is depleted. I’d like to point out one truism for Cebu, that indeed our success story also helped bring down our growth. So with this in mind, it is high time we put people who know more about water into agencies like the Metropolitan Cebu Water District. I dare say time has come to stop putting political allies in our water agencies. Rather, it is time to put people who know about water in these positions.
We also hope and pray that the Sinulog Festival this month will be peaceful and joyful. As we all know, Sinulog has become the most famous festival in all of ASEAN. I just hope and pray that our mad traffic issues won’t affect the hosting of the Sinulog as much.
With 2020, we can only hope and pray that Pres. Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte would work hard to solve the most ticklish problem we’ve been having in our electronic elections, perhaps change it into a hybrid type of elections. I don’t have to remind our readers about what happened to former COMELEC Chairman Andy Bautista who escaped the clutches of the law. When we’ve removed Smartmatic from the equation, then we can proceed in fixing our current political system.
As we’ve pointed many times already, the root of our problems lies in the unitary form of governance that we have been under since the implementation of the 1935 Constitution. When we changed our constitution to the 1973 and later to the 1987 Constitution, the framers of our constitution only genuflected to the altar of Imperial Manila. People like Christian and Solita Monsod who always badmouth a federal system should be put in their proper places.
Mind you, we don’t have enough space to write the whole benefits of federalism, which we can see in 25 countries like the US, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, India, and Malaysia or roughly 40% of the world’s population. This is why people who write that federalism can produce warlordism should explain to us where are the warlords in many federal countries in Europe. Those who lie about a federal state are giving a disservice to Filipinos ignorant of the federal form of government. They should educate our people rather than mislead them.
A case in point is Germany, which after the debacle of World War I had the weak Weimar Republic, which was taken over by the Nazis. But after the devastation of Germany during World War II, finally Germany adopted a federal form of government and ever since, Germany has become the most stable nation in Europe.
One major benefit of federalism is that the Office of the Ombudsman will be broken into federal states and we don’t have to wait for one person in Imperial Manila to file a case against a corrupt government official. So we wish that for 2020, we could start the path for a federal form of government so the Filipino people can have a clear view of our political future, which would be akin to our European brethren.
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