Home 
Can the country’s 135 other cities learn about the futility of deliberate blindness as policy? Cebu City’s “SOS” from hissing water taps offers a lesson.
Help supply an additional 27,500 cubic meters of water daily, Metro Cebu Water District called on private water suppliers. Isn’t that amount piddling by standards of today’s “imploding” cities? So, why the anxiety?
“Groundwater in Cebu has been precarious,” explains agency district manager Armando Paredes. In this century of cyberspace and globalization, MCWD can pipe water into just four of ten homes.
Nine areas in Cebu and Mandaue, mostly located in upland barangays, with large concentrations of people, didn’t have 24-hour supply, Cebu Daily News reported. The water agency’s obsolete and leaky transmission lines didn’t adequately serve nine major population-crammed barangays.
“Partnership with private suppliers will hopefully materialize in talks (that could tap) small pockets of water sources in certain places,” Parades added.
So, has it come down to this: scrounging for the last few drops available? And what brought the “Queen City” to this parched state of affairs?
There is no substitute for water. Babies and migrants tripled Cebu’s population in 40 years. They washed, splashed and gargled their way through 94 million cubic meters (mcm) last year. Demand will surge to 210 mcm per year in 2030.
By then, Cebu’s population could exceed the original projection of 4.3 million. Serious “undercounts” marred the 2007 census, demographers warn.
But wait. Didn’t Mayor Tomas Osmeńa, over the years, insist until blue in the face: “We have no water problem”? He scoffed at warnings of crippling water shortages aired by scientific agencies: Delft University, Asia Development Bank, United States Agency for International Development. He spiked a water master plan, prepared with Dutch government support, when The Hague rebuffed his efforts to grab project funds.
Snickers earlier caused Osmeńa to drop his mid-‘90s plan that tropical denuded Cebu clone the semi-temperate model of Lake Arrowhead in the U.S. A Lake Arrowhead expert pointed out differences in population, water source and overarching legislation.
And in 2007, he tied up in knots a proposal by World Bank, Ayala, Stateland Equity and Viscal Corp. to pipe 40,000 cubic meters of water daily. He also did not offer an alternative. Sound-bytes, the 135 other cities should learn, do not produce a single drop of water.
In the in-between years, Osmeńa treated water with caustic neglect. His time – and city funds – went into a grandiose reclamation project initially bankrolled by yen loans. And that mindset of neglecting unglamorous basics like water is exacting a toll.
Today, a full quarter of the city’s budget is tied up in amortizing the IOUs – for a project that hasn’t taken off. Cebu slum dwellers pay ambulant peddlers over thrice the cost of piped water. “We pay more for our gastro outbreaks,” says a nun who works with the poor.
Water policy for Cebu City was what Mayor Osmeńa said or didn’t do – a subservient city council agreed. Thus, it allocated P130 million for a new legislative building while old pipes leaked away more than 30 percent of pumped water.
Today, one out of four drinks from polluted wells in Cebu, both city and province. This locks people into recurring gastro outbreaks, says the United Nations Human Development Report. It’s on par with Senegal and Krygstan. It hasn’t tapped water from outlying towns. Metro Cebu sucks 275,000 cubic meters daily from its small aquifers – double what they can recharge. The gap in supply is closed by “borrowing against tomorrow.”
This is ecological bankruptcy. Salt now taints a full third of Cebu’s aquifers, resulting in irreversible damage. Water tables plummeted to twice as deep as 10 years back. Metro Cebu industries are saddled with hefty extra water bills.
In fact, Mayor Tomas Osmeńa’s pride – the 297-hectare South Reclamation Project – is water-short. The energy-intensive process of desalination pegged SRP water at P62 per cubic meter when oil cost $70 a barrel. Today, oil fetches $124.
“It is a puzzlement,” as Yul Brynner said in “The King And I.” There’s no puzzle here, Viewpoint column said. It’s only the “politics of water.” Like other places, Cebu has a glut of back-stepping leaders, who posture as if they’re moving forward. Their objections cloak failure to devise long-term solutions for a water crisis they ignored – which MCWD seeks to patch up.
Dry faucets can quickly turn into ugly political unrest. And “agitation is a poor substitute for policy. It does not craft a strategy to usher people into an era of radically-reduced resources. “Failing to reverse ecological decay, Cebuanos today prepare to pass on their unpaid ecological IOUs to the next generation – as their fathers did before them.”
Few Cebuanos ever heard – or give a damn – about Millennium Development Goals, scoffed a city official. He was reminded that under one of the MDGs, the Philippines is committed to halve the number of those who lack safe water.
“All eight MDGs have “one factor in common: water,” Asian Development Bank president Haruhiko Kuroda told a conference to reverse the slump in financing for water. India and the Philippines will miss the 2015 target for halving the proportion of people who lack clean water.
And even if the city’s leaders can’t be bothered, the country’s 135 other cities are getting a tutorial on feigned blindness.
