Tabuk City, Kalinga - “Governors and mayors are ready to troop to the Senate to protest the huge budget cut from the Barangay Development Program for NPA-cleared barangays of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) in the 2022 Budget,” the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) said in a press release on Tuesday, November 23, 2021.
It can be recalled that the Senate Committee on Finance has slashed an amount of P24 billion pesos or 86% from the NTF-ELCAC’s proposed budget for the year 2022, a move, according to Sen. Juan Edgardo Angara, borne out of questions of alleged misuse.
However, several officials nationwide expressed dismay over the budget’s reduction, stating the disadvantages of the move and citing the threats against development and security that communist terrorist groups (CTGs) may cause in their respective locality.
Gov. Nelson Dayanghirang of Davao Oriental, Gov. Arthur Yap of Bohol, Gov. Ben Evardone of Eastern Samar, and Municipal Mayor Eric Constantino of Abra de Ilog, Occidental Mindoro, during the NTF-ELCAC weekly press conference on Monday, said they are ready to lead their fellow governors and mayors in going to the Senate to protest against the proposed budget cut from the Support to Barangay Development Program (SBDP) next year’s General Appropriations Act.
The group also said they will campaign against senators who will vote for said reduction.
Governor Dayanghirang said that local government units (LGUs) are again winning the fight against communist terrorist groups (CTGs) now that basic infrastructure and services are being brought to far-flung barangays through the SBD program.
Governor Yap, on the other hand, said that through the SBDP-funded local road projects, the province could source out at least P5 billion as additional funding for the P30-billion government investment in creating much needed local access road projects to make Bohol a tourism destination, which would eventually boost the province’ economy.
Meanwhile, Governor Evardone said that the government is on the verge of defeating terrorism and the freed barangays are the ones who direly need the government support. He said that the SBDP augmented the LGUs' efforts to provide for projects these communities needed considering the local government’s limited resources.
Mayor Constantino also said that through SBDP, the people now realized who really cares for them and that the government, he said, should sustain this gain.
DILG Undersecretary and Spokesperson Jonathan Malaya appealed to the Senate not to cut the SBDP budget from P28.1-billion to P4-billion because it will render the cleared barangays vulnerable anew to communist aggression.
“Our governors and mayors are the ones who organized local peace processes in their areas and now that the LGUs have gained an upper hand against communist terrorism, cutting the budget for barangay development would undermine their gains and is tantamount to sending the people back to the clutches of communist terrorists,” he said.
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