Begin the begin

IF you were Mayor Isko Moreno, where do you begin?

A true-blue Manileño, a genu­ine Tondo boy who knows the city from the ground up, garbage dumps included, he’s got a lot on his plate or, shall we say, in his trash bin. But it’s a disservice to connect so much of the “basura” image to Isko. With outgoing Mayor Erap having said his piece and Fred Lim packing for a vaca­tion away from Manila with his family, Isko is lucky that he has a template to follow, sort of. He has President Duterte’s cleanup of Bo­racay and Manila Bay to guide him as soon as he rolls up his sleeves: The key is political will. The City of Manila aches for a cleanup, top to bottom, inside City Hall and all around it. Malate, Qui­apo, Sampaloc, Sta. Cruz. Crime. Dirt. Squalor. Traffic caused by stubborn people, not lack of road space. A dying city, as noted by a former mayor of Davao City.

The old charm of the city is gone, lost in the morass of politi­cal, moral, social, environmental and aesthetic corruption. I use the word not in a fiscal sense but in its primary sense of rotting, pu­trid. A balikbayan could not be­lieve her eyes when we passed through the “palengke” area of the inner city as directed by Ms. Waze one fine day: “Has the city come to this? So ugly.”

City Hall to blame, the barangays and their chieftains, residents and transients? I told my friend, Ma­nila is not alone. She nodded, “I know what you mean. But Manila is the capital of the Philippines!”

Remember that, Mayor Isko. Ma­nila is the capital, if that should count for something. While new population centers are rising, branching out to Laguna, Clark, and elsewhere pinpointed by de­velopers with foresight, you may want to consult an urban planner whose abilities you could trust. In­coming Senator Francis Tolentino took a course in urban planning in London (if memory serves). Jun Palafox designed the city of Dubai, whose Emir had the wisdom to plant a million trees to bring down the desert temperatures.

The job of renewing Manila is herculean, like cleaning out the Augean stables and Sisyphus condemned to roll a rock up the mountain as it kept rolling down again. But you asked for it, so let’s go!