EDITORIAL - Renaming for the better

It is good that all nine Cebu congressmen have crossed party lines to endorse a resolution, by Rep. Benhur Salimbangon (4th District, Cebu), seeking to change the name of the Mandaue-Mactan Bridge to Serging Osmeña Bridge.

Serging Osmeña is the son and namesake of the late president Sergio Osmeña Sr. Serging held various positions in government -- mayor, congressman, governor, senator -- and famously lost the 1969 presidential race to Ferdinand Marcos, an election that offered the first glimpse of an incipient dictatorship.

But aside from his political achievements, what brings closer to context the reason for wanting to rename after Serging the Mandaue-Mactan Bridge is the fact that it was he who envisioned the very first span to connect Cebu mainland and the island of Mactan.

The reason the bridge could not be named after Serging at the time it was built because - and here is the irony - it was built by his enemy Marcos in 1972. And it could not be named Marcos Bridge either because Marcos was brilliant enough to know the Cebuanos would rise up in revolt if he did.

And so everyone settled on the more generic-sounding Mandaue-Mactan Bridge. And while that is in fact the official name to this day, it is indeed too generic that people, including media who are supposed to know better, often erroneously call it in reverse, or worse, as simply the first bridge to Mactan.

Renaming the bridge, therefore, will not only give honor where honor is long overdue, it will at the same time straighten out that blip in local history where political interests got in the way of the innocent application of government service.

Moreover, it will finally put an end to the ambiguity of people in dealing with the names of the two bridges connecting Cebu and Mactan. Because people refer to the Mandaue-Mactan Bridge as the first bridge, it sort of became a matter of course to also call the Marcelo Fernan Bridge as the second bridge.

And that can prove disconcerting to visitors and non-Cebuanos who are clueless as to which was built earlier than what bridge. Besides, we cannot go on simply calling things according to the chronological order of their construction, especially now that a third bridge is being proposed to be built.