Davao: Beyond the usual

FOR STARTERS, there’s father and daughter engaged in a game of musical chairs at the city hall of Davao: long-time Mayor Rodrigo Duterte and his daughter, Vice Mayor “Inday” Sara, trading places.
Nothing of “politics as usual” there. Even in its weirdest praxis hereabouts.
Everything unusual, really extraordinary for a “measly” city vice mayor to beat, no, make that avalanche, in a mayoralty contest the sitting Speaker of the House of Representatives himself. Yeah, until this time, so Davaoenos swear, Prospero Nograles still did not know what hit him.
Father-daughter then, daughter-father now lording over a sprawling metropolis of 2,444 square kilometres with one and a half million people, is everyday politics to their constituents. “Duterte, as usual.” So it is shrugged about. Not in some hopelessly indifferent way, but with certain accomplished pride.
Davao City is everything every city in the country, Angeles and San Fernando included, Quezon and Manila not excluded, should aspire to be.
It is green – its hills and mountains densely (re)forested, and clean – nothing of the usual mounds of uncollected garbage stacks against walls and electric posts that make the very definition of urban centers. As a matter of record, Davao City has indeed been adjudged Cleanest and Greenest City in the country. And it has the cleanest ground water too.
Davao City is a zone of peace and a haven of order. So totally different, nay, alien, to the city I went to in the ‘80s when one of its districts was terrifyingly dubbed “Nicaragdao” after then strife-torn Nicaragua, what with the rightist Alsa Masa waging a virtual uncivil war with the New People’s Army in the city.
No, you don’t get to see combat-ready cops in any street corner or for that matter anywhere else in Davao City. But an Orwellian “Big Brother” is looking at, if not after, you all around the city. His all-seeing eyes in the closed circuit cameras virtually in all principal roads of the city, operating 24/7 from the Public Safety Command Center. It is a P750-million system that has enabled no-contact apprehension of erring motorists, assisted in traffic accidents, and deterred criminal elements. The system is set to be expanded to cover city boundaries to monitor any inroad some terror group may attempt to take.
A lesson in trust that order has brought about: During communion Sunday evening at the Redemptorist church, women’s handbags are left unattended at the pews. Go, try that anywhere else in the country, and suffer.
Sedate – by the standards of Angeles – is the nightlife of Davao City. A prohibition of alcohol exempts no establishment from 2 in the morning onward to dawn.
And Metro Manila is just catching up with Davao City’s nine-year-old smoking ban in all public places. Lest it be forgotten, firecrackers are likewise banned in the city, New Year’s Eve and kung hei fat choi notwithstanding.
Davao City has been hailed as the Most Competitive Metro City in the Philippines based on a competitiveness survey conducted by the Asian Institute of Management. All it takes to validate – and affirm – the result of the AIM survey is a look-and-see around the city: high competition rules where compulsive consumption abounds. Davao has seven really large shopping malls: the old Victoria Plaza and New City Commercial Center, two Gaisanos, a Robinsons, an SM, and the just opened Abreeza, an Ayala Mall. Even as SM is expanding its existing mall, it is building another one, reportedly complete with a convention center and some lodging facilities.
Where one or two is the usual, eight, unarguably, is a most unusual count when it comes to the number of malls obtaining in a single city.
Sans the malls, down to its essentials of clean and green, its peace and order, the quality of its resources, both human and natural, and its infrastructure Davao City had ranked 17th – the highest of all Philippine cities – among the Most Liveable Cities in Asia in a survey conducted by Asiaweek Magazine from 1996 to 2000. Wonder how high it now ranks given its latest amenities.
And then there is Davao City, the perennial tour and travel destination.
Even as Mount Apo, the country’s tallest peak; waling-waling, the queen of orchids; pithecophaga jeffryi ,the Philippine eagle; and durian, the fruit that “smells like hell but tastes like heaven” have remained the top attractions of the city, there are a host of others that are equally enchanting.
And that is where I indulged myself for three days, in things beyond the usual at Davao. But that is better presented in some feature stories with photographs to boot. For more reading pleasure.