Floods and streetlights

The editorial in this paper last Tuesday, September 3, reported on the crippling floods that hit Cebu City the Sunday before, and of a consultative meeting promptly called by City Hall to "finally" solve the problem. In the same issue, columnist Nigel Paul Villarete talked of a so-called streetlight effect that affects governments, institutions, and individuals.

Call it providential, propitious, whatever. But the two topics just seemed destined to appear together. First the streetlight effect. Villarete talked of a policeman seeing a drunk man looking for something under a streetlight. Told that the drunk lost his keys, the cop joined the search. After many minutes of futile searching, the exasperated cop asked the drunk if he was sure this was where he lost his keys.

The drunk said no, that he lost his keys in the park but that it was easier to search here because there was light. Now let us go to the floods and the consultative meeting the editorial reported as having been promptly called by City Hall to "finally" address the problem. In that meeting, a P2.5-billion fund was promptly assured to finance flood projects.

It was also reported that an inter-agency coordinating task force was just as promptly created to monitor the projects. Enter the streetlights effect again, this time with the cop asking not where the keys could have been lost but where the flood projects might be. The bright lights were there --the P2.5 billion funding, the monitoring committee.

But where were the keys, or in this case, the flood projects? Why, they were still in some inscrutable darkness somewhere, just like the drunk's keys. If, as Villarete laments, government would build schools in the hinterlands because that is where the land is, and never mind if they are far from where the student is, so City Hall now sets aside funds and creates a monitoring committee for flood projects that have yet to be imagined.

This is not to say funds are not needed, or that committees are not required. But without first having a project on the drawing board, that is like putting the cart before the horse, or in the context of this piece, searching for keys lost in the park under some faraway streetlight simply because that is where the light is.

There is no argument the search for a solution to the city's perennial flood problem is both critical and urgent. But it is one thing to search for a solution that is real, and another to just come up with anything just to have something to show for it. Certainly the Cebuanos did not expect City Hall to emerge with the solution after just one consultative meeting.

On the contrary, Cebuanos do not wish to be dealt false hopes, which is essentially what happened when funds were promised and a committee formed in relation to projects that have not even been yet imagined. The problem is vast and complex and will not be solved within Mayor Edgardo Labella's time, even if that is all he ever does. Even streetlights cannot illuminate what is not there.