CUTTING the funds of the Barangay Development Program (BDP) will hurt poor Filipinos the most and not the National Task Force, which is implementing it through local officials, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said on Thursday.
This, as presidential aspirant Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. expressed worry that the successful campaign of National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-Elcac) may be put to waste after the Senate slashed the agency’s budget for 2022 by P24 billion.
The defense chief issued the statement in response to the move by the Senate Finance Committee to cut the BDP budget due to what its chairman, Senator Sonny Angara, said was an issue over proper accounting.
Lorenzana said the senators’ move “shows their lack of appreciation of the plight of our folks in the remote barangays..”
“Their act was supposed to punish the NTF, but in effect they are punishing the poor people who would have benefitted from the infrastructure and social services projects under the BDP. The previous BDP funds were all disbursed through the LGUs,” he said in a statement issued by Defense spokesman Arsenio Andolong.
Instead of the proposed P28.1 billion, the Senate committee just gave a budget of P4 billion to the NTF-Elcac and its BDP project. The NTF is a body implementing the anti-insurgency program of the government.
In slashing its funds, Angara said the task force has failed to report to the Senate on how it spent its budget for this year.
Others proposed that instead of appropriating money to the NTF-Elcac, the senators should defund it, which Lorenzana objected to.
“The proposal by VP Robredo to abolish NTF-Elcac because it could be used like Tokhang is misplaced,” he said. The NTF has been implementing its mandate for the past two years and we have not received any complaints from the target barangays.”
“Likewise, the NTF is already implementing a whole-of-nation approach to address the ‘root causes’ of insurgency. VP Robredo may consider inviting the NTF-Elcac for a dialogue so she can be enlightened on the interagency body’s mission,” the defense secretary added.
In a statement, Marcos, the standard-bearer of the Partido Federal ng Pilipinas (PFP), said he was saddened by the Senate’s decision to reduce the budget of NTF-Elcac to P4 billion for next year.
“The good things begun by the agency may all just go to waste. We know that funds must be sufficient to defeat the insurgency that we have been fighting for five decades,” noted Marcos, in whose father’s term the communist party was set up.
Although Marcos acknowledged that the government funding should be focused on the fight against Covid-19, he stressed that the country must also prioritize the fight against any government threat and insurgency led by the Communist Party of the Philippines, New People’s Army, and National Democratic Front (CPP-NPA-NDF).
Records from the task force show a total of 882 barangays in the country have been cleared from NPA presence from 2016 to 2019.
According to NTF-Elcac, from its P16.44 billion budget this year, most went to its flagship program —the Barangay Development Program (BDP)—where they provided development package incentives of P20 million to each barangay cleared of communist influence, including the construction of farm-to-market roads, health stations, classrooms, water sanitation systems, rural electrification and other livelihood programs.