“Our electorate prefers promising populists, dynasts and celebrities to the truly deserving doers”
FOLLOWING the massive floods the national capital region and nearby provinces went through with Typhoon Carina, both DPWH and MMDA officials pointed to garbage clogging our drainage systems and pumping stations.
As expected, these appointed officials could not point an accusing finger on the elected legislators whose greed in exacting kickbacks resulted in sub-standard, even non-existent river dredging and flood control projects through the years.
We wrote about this last week right after the metropolis suffered from unusually heavy rainfall that caused flooding, getting people to wonder about the president’s claim in his third SONA about more than 5,500 flood control projects.
Even the revelation there is no flood mitigation master plan which came out in the Senate hearing glossed over the real cause of uncoordinated and piece meal projects: the pork barrel system of entitlements our legislators in both houses have never given up, and in fact increased by multiples from the time when 70 million apiece in the 90s under Cory till Erap ballooned into one and 2 billion apiece for congressmen and senators, respectively, with favorites getting much more than the ordinary legislators.
Still, there is no denying the garbage which residents throw away with no segregation whatsoever has compounded the problem of perennial flooding.
Our fellow columnist, Louie Biraogo, wrote a nice piece the other day about incineration as a practical solution to our garbage woes, which at present goes to sanitary landfills in the peripheral towns and cities of the metropolis.
The problem is in passing the Clean Air Act of 1999, our legislators caviled to the intense pressure of environmentalists who could not accept incineration due to its supposed toxic fumes, closing the door to possibilities of state-of-the-art technological innovations that may in the future minimize air pollutants.
Being the secretary for political affairs at the time, then President Erap Estrada asked me to assess some proponents of sanitary landfills and other solutions to the garbage problem.
One proposal was to use a huge open pit hollowed out by mining in Zambales as landfill, but the problem was the cost and difficulty of transporting garbage from NCR to Zambales.
Another proposal was to ship garbage to Semirara in Antique, but what if rough waters caused a barge filled with detritus to sink in Tablas or the waters facing our fabled Boracay?
Think of the Terra Nova and another vessel that sank in Limay and Mariveles, and caused oil slicks reaching Cavite’s coastal towns and cities? Or what happened last year in Oriental Mindoro? And a decade before in Guimaras.
My good friend, Marikina Mayor Bayani Fernando (who died in a freak accident September last year), proposed a creative solution: bring the garbage to various train stations of the southbound PNR, load these into dedicated wagons, and bring them to some town in Quezon province where, in a huge tract of land, workers could segregate the garbage through mechanized conveyor systems, the recyclable wastes like paper and plastic going to recycling factories in the site, and the organic wastes going to composting areas also on site.
The facility would include housing for informal settlers and even provincial folk who could be employed in the conveyorized segregation system and the recycling and composting plants.
“Marangal namang hanapbuhay ang magbasura,” Bayani then reasoned, but Quezon folks cried NIMBY (not in my backyard), an emotional reaction.
Eventually we would have to incinerate, given that technology has developed where emissions are within acceptable levels.
In fact, incineration is practiced in several countries, and I saw one in Japan where they produced energy from the incinerating plant, with ash residues likewise useful in steel making.
Then President Erap promised BF he would head the MMDA after Jojo Binay who had decided to resign in Feb. 2001 to run once again for mayor of Makati.
As fate would have it, Erap was deposed by the EDSA Dos mob on Jan. 21, 2001.
Still, recognizing his effectivity, GMA would appoint Bayani, as we used to call him, to head MMDA and DPWH.
His wife, Marides succeeded him as mayor when he joined the GMA Cabinet, where she implemented a successful waste segregation system, where Marikenos dutifully separated the “nabubulok” and the recyclables, collected by scheduled, color-coded green and pink trucks, a model that should have been followed elsewhere.
BF’s purposive leadership which instilled order and discipline in Marikina was however not appreciated enough by the rest of the nation when he later sought national office.
Like I keep repeating, our electorate prefers promising populists, dynasts and celebrities to the truly deserving doers.
