EDITORIAL - Caged wisdom

Wisdom, apparently, does not reside in every Osmeña. Back when he was governor, from 1988 to 1992, Lito Osmeña saw the wisdom of selling off the then club Filipino golf course, then earning the government only two thousand pesos, for a whooping half-a-billion pesos.

The sale triggered a frenzy of infrastructure development that eventually saw Cebu actually outpacing the rest of the country in economic growth, prompting the birth of the term Ceboom that drew worldwide interest in this "island in the Pacific."

The same wisdom does not seem to reside in Lito's cousin Tomas Osmeña, the Cebu City mayor who, out of sheer belligerence if for nothing else, wants to keep the Cebu city Zoo in a piece of land that belongs to the province and which Governor Gwen Garcia wants to repossess.

The Cebu City Zoo is a poor excuse for a zoo. What creatures have the misfortune to be kept there are too few to be of any real interest to anyone. A pre-school picture book has more animals in 10 pages than that zoo. Worse, the animals live in very deplorable conditions there.

Governor Garcia, also possessed with the wisdom Tomas Osmeña sorely lacks, see better use of the land than a zoo. In the mind of Gwen, why continue to put up with an insuffereable excuse for a zoo when the land can be put to better use as a site for a women's crisis center.

At a time when more women are increasingly becoming victims in a dog-eat-dog world, a women's crisis center assumes more relevance to society than a zoo that, in the strictest sense of the word, has never been really one.

For a city that pretends to rank highly up there among the world's great cities, what face has the mayor got to show visitors who may want to see a zoo and find the sorry excuse that we have for one?

The province of Cebu has been greatly blessed to have had a succession of leaders possessed with the wisdom to see things for their real worth. Unfortunately, the same blessings have not descended on the city, especially with a mayor who sees only what he wants to see.