EDITORIAL – Caught in the crossfire

If the mayors of the nation’s premier region see every move of the Metro Manila Development Authority as an opportunity to make a political statement through defiance, lawmakers should just abolish the MMDA. In the endless feuding between MMDA Chairman Bayani Fernando and several mayors, it’s the public that suffers.

Yesterday we saw another example of this. In several areas in Metro Manila, traffic enforcers were pulling over motorists for defying the number-coded traffic reduction scheme. The MMDA had announced Sunday that the coding scheme would be suspended for two weeks starting yesterday. The independent republics of Makati, Mandaluyong and San Juan refused to go along, but made known their refusal only yesterday morning.

The MMDA should have first found out which cities or municipalities did not want to suspend the traffic scheme. With three areas hosting major commercial centers refusing to go along, the resulting confusion simply gave traffic enforcers an opportunity to extort lunch money from harried motorists or collect a cut from the day’s fines.

The problem should prompt a review of the need to maintain an agency headed by a presidential appointee that is supposed to coordinate the delivery of certain basic services by local governments headed by elected officials.

Those services obviously include traffic management; common sense dictates that mayors cannot go it alone in this department. There has to be a body supervising the flow of traffic in an overcrowded urban center such as Metro Manila. That body must consult mayors on traffic schemes, but it must have the final say on matters pertaining to traffic management and its orders must be enforced.

The suspension of the coding scheme is not the only MMDA order that is being ignored by local government executives. The MMDA wisely banned children from begging from motorists through crude caroling during the holidays. But the children are still there, along with adults carrying babies as they rap on car windows. There should be a place for everything, including charity; there are enough churches and organizations that will accept donations for distribution to the poor. But nothing is ever in its proper place in this country.

National leaders should ponder the wisdom of maintaining an agency that has been rendered ineffectual by local executives who are incapable of seeing any picture larger than the spheres of their personal interests. If MMDA officials and Metro mayors want to spray each other with gunfire, they can go ahead. But they should make sure the people of Metro Manila do not get caught in the crossfire.