EDITORIAL - Fool's errand

The city council is allocating P3.6 million to dig wells up in the mountains in search of water in the middle of the dry spell, relying on the advice of an 80-year-old "water diviner" on where to aim the pick and shovel.

Only in the Philippines can you find the legislative body of its second most important city finding merit in believing what a quack has to say. That it is in fact showing a willingness to spend good money on such a folly is even more disconcerting.

And with just a little over a month before a new administration kicks in, it would appear that the city council is pursuing this "fool's errand" with indecent haste. Why couldn't it just wait for a month or so before visiting the enterprise under a new light?

The closest justification for such a folly was propounded, albeit for an entire different reason, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in The Sirens of Titan: "Anybody who has traveled this far on a fool's errand has no choice but to uphold the honor of fools by completing the errand."

But truth is far different from fiction. And Cebu City is home while Titan is a moon in faraway Saturn, where there is probably no living creature to care whether water as we know it on earth even exists.

Allocating P3.6 million to dig 18 wells to address water shortage is a uselessly costly way of giving fish so one can eat for a day, instead of teaching somebody how to fish that he may eat for a lifetime.

Even a million wells will not solve water shortage for the simple reason that no well can cough up a single drop of water where there is no more water to cough up. Digging wells is not the answer to water shortage, but planting trees is.

Yet, are our honorable members of the city council even aware of this? In all likelihood they are not, judging by the eagerness with which they are poised to follow, step by step, where an 80-year-old quack allows her flight of fancy to take them.

If this is the way the city council takes seriously its responsibility to deliver good governance, it might as well save on the money by just sticking their fingers into their mouths and then sticking them out into the wind to see if it is going to rain.