FRIDAY, October 3, supposedly a big day for Iloilo City, host of the ongoing national convention of the Association of Tourism Officers of the Philippines. The local government wanted to impress guests and locals with a parade with cultural troupes from the municipalities and city of Iloilo performing.

Everything was a dud. Kaput. Pffttt. What happened was, the parade that was supposed to start at 3 pm began at around 5 pm and it didn’t wind through the main streets of Iloilo City because of the downpour.

Whoever organized what was otherwise a big event deserves a kalabasa award. (Was it you, city tourism officer Ben Jimena?)

Which reminds me of a big junket to the US organized by the city tourism office and the Dinagyang Foundation a couple of years back. The city dispatched a delegation of Dinagyang performers. Business people who chipped in generous sums to shoulder the transportation and allowances of the young performers and Dinagyang bigwigs were later heard cursing because the trip yielded nothing for Iloilo but only waste of money and a trail of unsavory gossips of the high school kids having been sexually molested by supposedly official chaperons.

Friday, October 3, was another expensive affair that yielded nothing but curses from the public waiting for the parade that never passed by, and later, by stranded motorists, public jeepney drivers, and workers and employees rushing under the rains to get home.

As early as 2 pm, the traffic mismanagement and mis-engineering unit of Iloilo City, shut off major roads at the city proper. Those from Jaro and La Paz had only up to Gaisano City. Those from the south passing Luna Street, or from Tanza and Estanzuela, had only up to Quezon Street. Commuters must walk the rest to their destinations at the city proper.

Some lucky guys at the traffic misengineering unit or city tourism office indeed must be lined up against the wall for not using their brain.

First off, starting the parade at 5 pm doesn’t make sense in that very few would be interested to watch. By then, people customarily rush to get home. Those from the towns (and they are many) don’t have the luxury to stay longer. They risk losing the chance to catch the last trip home.

The rain that aborted the disorganized parade was sufficient signal to Mayor Jerry Trenas to restore sanity in the streets. At past 7 pm, only private vehicles plied the main city streets moving at guarded speed to avoid commuters braving the drizzles on foot like refugees tugging their purchases to the nearest jeepney stops, which meant one or two kilometers all the way to Gaisano City, La Paz, or Luna-Quezon Sts., or the city-owned Super Market.

It made no sense to keep on blocking the main city roads from 5 pm through 8 pm from public traffic when its purpose, to give way to the parade, already went off.

Anybody of sound mind would readily conclude that the city government collapsed that instant as nobody from city hall responded to restore order or, at least let public jeepneys in to pick up stranded commuters. Nobody cared to stop the idiocy of needlessly shutting off the main traffic arteries from public vehicles.

Had Trenas, Jimena and their cabal been seen loitering the streets that instant, they all might have ended being lynched by irate commuters.

Or they would have seen first hand such public indignation or heard personally the curses upon curses heaped on the city government and its top apparatchniks.

Enough of Trenas regaling of his vision of making Iloilo City the “queen city of the south once more” when, to begin with, he can’t even correct the chaos he himself has created.

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