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Philippines
Thursday, March 28, 2024

Cleaning up the metro

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Ask any town fiesta host what’s    hard to find in the run-up to the big day, and the    answer is always carpenters.  There will be chefs galore and the parade of livestock to the abattoir may not cease. But collaring someone to do an emergency house makeover is the real challenge.  

The drill in staging the yearly mass feeding is that the house must be presentable too as guests will not only feast on the spread but also on the residence of the host. It is not enough that desserts come in appealing colors, the house; must be one big eye candy, too. Thus the need to hire pastry-makers and painters with equal urgency.

So that after the last plate used by the last guest has been washed, what is left is a spruced-up house which the owners would survey in awe as they mentally calculate the bills they racked up in between contented burps from a banquet that was.

A friend calls this the residual benefit of a splurge which not only    households but towns and nations enjoy after a hosting a party.

True, because post-fiesta, a town hall sports a fresh coat of paint and the roads patched-up with balls of asphalt. Street lamps glow with such incandescence never seen before, courtesy of new bulbs.

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A city hosting a Palaro Pambansa    will spend months prettifying the city. Before the games’ flame is  lit, the city burns the  midnight  oil to make itself presentable. Before the first crack of a starting gun is heard, it is the sound of    jackhammers in a city in a building spree which first reverberates.

What drives these   frenzied activities    is pride—and the fear that botched-up preparations would permanently scar the hometown’s image.  

That dread is shared by the residents for such an undertaking is never seen as an exclusive government production but one that involves all. Everyone pitches in, like painting the wall of one’s house even if it’s far from the parade route. Civic pride is marshalled that it becomes a truly communal affair.

On a larger scale, countries which host Olympics are left with facilities for public use after the flag has been hoisted down. The dividends can be in the form of a new subway line, an Olympic village repurposed into affordable housing, or a spanking-new airport terminal.

It is these residual benefits which residents of Metro Manila are looking for as the country hosts its second Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ summit in 18 years.

Perhaps their curiosity is tickled by the price tag of the event, bandied about at P12 billion. At this cost, one can reasonably expect new underpass lights and scrubbed walls once darkened by diesel soot.

And at that cost, the people      know too well not to expect magnificent new edifices. Just a general clean-up of Manila would do,    or in dermatological terms, nothing of the surgical kind—a facial would be fine.

Not that the metropolis is alien to the concept of    architectural windfalls from its past hosting of global events.  Scan its landscape and you find    their concrete souvenirs.

Many hotels today were built in time for the 1976 World Bank-IMF meeting which was held    at Philippine International Convention Center, site of this week’s Apec powwow. As folks who discoed in the age of bellbottoms would recall,  nearby Folk Arts Theater was a Miss Universe pageant    venue.

Knowing that their    government struggles with road reblocking and treats the installation of LRT escalators    as a Herculean task, it is no wonder why people have lowered    their Apec expectations to something cosmetic—not new roads but old ones rid of potholes;    not new walls but grime washed off ancient ones; not fragrant  esteros but for those that have become sewers to be liberated of trash for once.

But even on this devalued yardstick, government seems to be having a hard time complying.

A week ago, the walls near the Metro Manila Development Authority office were still crawled with graffiti. The underpasses along Edsa were still in their natural color: 50 shades of grey. A week ago, too, that mausoleum that was once a film center was crying for dab of paint. Baclaran was still in its riotous element.        Hopefully, the junkyard near the Government Service Insurance System building would have been cleaned up by now.

I was expecting    corporations    to roll up their garish tarpaulins to reduce visual pollution but it seems Apec did not ignite the national esprit de corps that would have ignited such an act. For why would they when politicos did not even bother    to bring down their epal tarps?          

I know that my friends would pillory me for using a simplistic metric in gauging the country’s benefits from hosting this    Apec meeting.    And    I expect them to rattle off data    showing gazillions of pesos from trade deals which came to fruition as a result of   our Apec membership.

I would just tell them to allow me to use a pedestrian barometer because sometimes street views yield the same perspective as the one gleaned    from an ivory tower.

And the view from the street is crystal clear: Metro Manila needs a major clean-up, a real clean-and-green-drive, where trash is collected, sidewalks are clean, littering is fined,      greenery is nurtured, visual pollution is abated, and post-no-bill signs are heeded.

It is time to bring cleanliness in the governance scorecard.

 

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