Harboring the Harbour

By Rolo B. Cena
Hushed Poppies
Dumaguete Star Informer
15 April 2012

Manila, Philippines – As the Philippine Airlines airbus touched-down the tarmac of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, I couldn’t avoid transporting myself back to the years my family and I spent in the imperial Manila, home to egocentric approaches of self-propelled political platform in the guise of consumer-istic economic development.

Overwhelmed by the perks I had to enjoy in visiting our branches located in major seaports of the country, the stimulation gradually deteriorated as reality of Manila was slowly unfolding.

The supposedly shorter trip from the South to North Harbour took hours due to severing traffic congestion that has plagued the metropolis for decades now. As we drew near the Harbour, a glimpse of the informal settlers’ asymmetrically constructed shanties lining from the entrance of the bridge to the end part of the area caught my attention once more. From my recollection, the number significantly increased since late nineties.

Looking at the canvass reminds me of the informal settlers in most towns and cities in Negros Oriental that I have been to or have lived. From 2003, the number of shanties at the riverside, creeks, bridges and government-owned lands increased tremendously. In the neighboring town of the capital city alone, the alarming increase of informal-settling immigrants disturbed the government and the populace.

Based on my assessment, the bliss houses constructed by former Presidents Cory Aquino and Fidel Ramos seem like aged significantly over time. For someone who had witnessed its inauguration, the beautiful structures are beyond recognition: devoid of colors, sanitation, and order.

Drawing nearer to Vitas, West of Tondo’s Smokey Mountain, supplied deeper sense of my probe: Tondo has never improved and the government has failed in their programs of transforming the area from being a dump-site to a business-earning industrial estate of the sprawling North Harbour. Tons of garbage are dumped daily in the area and hundreds of informal settlers are arresting the area every month making it another “Bagong Silang” in the west of the metropolis. What a sight it would have been if the government is only sincere in their programs of eradicating poverty in the country. Thanks to pork barrels and election sheets attached to illegal squatting and poverty.

Side dish: Will the “tuwid na landas” of the younger Aquino succeed in relation to this agenda? Will he be able to put his teeth on what he was professing? As it is now, the country has been dragged to a more destructive process that brings us to another distortion; he is more inclined to convicting the people who became obstacles his family’s interests, instead of focusing on economic reforms that can propel the country to another paradigm and consequently alleviate long-running poverty.

Formerly known to be home to the beautiful sunset that became the tourism brand in the early Marcos years, today, Manila bay is a spot no more: a sanctuary of nocturnal flesh trades, crimes and criminalities, and commercial urban thrash that slowly deteriorates the country’s business and economic profile in the Far East.

And Manila is not Manila alone. It is a depiction of human and political greed that translates into a cascaded political disorder and economic chaos down to the smallest political subdivision of the country from Batanes to Tawi Tawi.

And what more can we expect from this wrong turns of uncontrolled and unprecedented economic and socio-political activities: A promise of wrath only titans can abort in their own sense and style, time and passion, and self-serving will.

And Dumaguete or Negros Oriental is not spared from this!