Mactan’s Terminal 2 to be opened next month

Last week, I had the golden opportunity to interview Andrew Harrison, chief executive advisor of the GMR-Megawide Cebu Airport Corp. (GMCAC) in his office at the Mactan Cebu International Airport (MCIA) for my TV talk show Straight from the Sky, which we will be showing next week. Apparently as Mr. Harrison pointed out, the new Terminal 2 will be ready for blessing on June 7 and the terminal will be operational by June 22. From the way things look, it seems that they still have a lot to do.

But given the reality as Mr. Harrison pointed out, this project is one year ahead of schedule despite the fact that it took the Philippine Air Force (PAF) nearly a year to give the land where the new terminal stands. Mr. Harrison credits this to Megawide’s expertise in construction where they used pre-stressed concrete, which is more durable and faster to build. I think they are ready for June 7. Incidentally, GMR-Megawide also bagged the construction of the new Clark International Airport… but not to manage it.

When the new Terminal 2 would be operational, Mr. Harrison expects an increase of at least 12.5 million passenger capacity. Mind you, this is just the new terminal building, while the old MCIA terminal would also be totally refurbished. Right now, passengers are getting a taste of things to come even with just the cosmetic changes that the GMCAC has done to the old terminal building.

Now as for the second runway, something which we have been writing about for decades now, Mr. Harrison said that they would widen one of the taxiways and turn it into an emergency runway in the meantime that they haven’t constructed the second runway yet. This is a good idea so that in the event that the main runway gets shut down, they can still use another runway so as not to stop airport operations.

As for the main Terminal 2 building, they are using a special kind of wood that they secured in Europe for a higher price, but it is the first time that wood is being used in a major airport terminal. Apparently Mr. Harrison told me that they sent their architects all over the Philippines in order to integrate Filipino culture which is why they settled for wood for the terminal building. So next month only the Terminal 2 will be blessed and operational, but the rest of the facilities would follow. I’m referring to the shopping malls and car parks that would be constructed around the terminal area. So GMCAC is ready for the next phase of our tourism boom in Cebu!

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As they say, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder!” It depends upon you how you look at last week’s May 14 issue of TIME Magazine entitled “Rise of the Strongman” wherein Pres. Rodrigo Duterte was featured in the front cover with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, which the author Ian Bremmer said is on a global trend in favor of “more muscular, assertive leadership” embodied by US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Yet, US Pres. Donald Trump is not included in this list.

So is this article praising Pres. Duterte or was this an insult to him? Meanwhile Pres. Duterte disputed TIME’s portrayal of him as a “strongman,” saying he respects democratic freedoms and insisted that he never acted like a king and that he still regards himself as a worker in government. Now that doesn’t sound like a strongman… I have never heard of a strongman who says that he is merely a government worker.

The TIME Magazine article, written by foreign policy expert and political scientist Ian Bremmer who apparently should have studied carefully how Pres. Duterte works under our democratic environment. A case in point was when Pres. Duterte signed Executive Order to put an end to labor contracting a.k.a. “Endo.” If Pres. Duterte was a strongman in the definition of Mr. Bremmer, then his EO to end endo should have amended or worse, repealed our Labor Code.

But when this Filipino “Strongman” signed his EO he did so with the words of caution… that the EO cannot amend our Labor Laws, you need to go to Congress to amend or repeal that law. So why did Ian Bremmer include Pres. Duterte in his list of strongmen? The TIME Magazine article pointed out, “the “rising tide of violent street crime” helped elect Duterte, who has vowed to “wipe out the drug trade with his own brand of justice.” It also described Duterte as “a former mayor who talked more like a mob boss than a President.” So if one talks tough like Pres. Duterte, then it qualifies him as a strongman? Methinks that TIME Magazine made a very bad judgment! But just the same, many pundits still believe that Pres. Duterte has not damaged our democratic institutions, unlike his predecessor, Pres. Benigno Aquino III.

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