JOB creation will be a top priority of the Marcos-Duterte tandem in order to hasten recovery from the scourge of Covid-19, if ever they are elected in this year’s elections.
This was revealed by presidential aspirant Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr., on Saturday in an interview with SMNI. He stressed the BBM-Sara UniTeam’s priority is to create more jobs that will focus on business, agriculture, tourism and infrastructures in line with the successful “Build, Build, Build” program of the Duterte administration.
“We must prepare ourselves for that recovery, we have to create jobs. That’s the first and most critical element in all of these, kailangan talaga ‘yung makabalik ang mga Pinoy sa trabaho[Filipinos must be able to get back their jobs],” said Bongbong over SMNI’s Point of Order program.
Among the top priorities, he said, is to focus on micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) as they can quickly create jobs for Filipinos and in the process put food on their tables.
“It’s all about jobs, we have to put Filipinos back to work and the way we do it is to invest in sectors where returns are good, or what we call, ‘you get the biggest bang for your buck’ when you invest in certain sectors that can quickly employ more people,” Bongbong said, speaking partly in Filipino.
Another focus of the BBM-Sara UniTeam is agriculture, which it deems as also a surefire way to provide a lot of jobs and help boost economic recovery.
He, however, qualified that the agriculture programs should not only be focused on giving assistance to farmers. Instead, long-term solutions are needed to keep the sector strong and ready should there be another disaster or tragedy.
“We will make more jobs because we are talking not about giving assistance to farmers or giving investment to cooperatives. What we are talking about is the entire system of agriculture which we will work on in order to ensure there’s a lot of downstream activity that will employ many people” Bongbong said.
Revitalization of tourism is also one way to create more jobs, the view of the UniTeam.
“Many rely on tourism. Let’s focus on tourism because, for one, the Philippines is trUly a beautiful destination, Just put good roads, clean up a place and you have a good tourist destination,” Bongbong noted.
He will also push for the continuation of the Build, “Build, Build” program of President Duterte that has created more than six million jobs since its launch in 2016.
He said they will “build upon it and we will make it more extensive but it will be in conformation to a larger plan of economic development.”
Apart from infrastructure, Bongbong also noted that the government must focus on the improvement of communication or digital infrastructure in the country, to make life easier for people, especially for students who rely on online schooling.
In the last quarter of 2021 alone, the unemployment rate in the country rose to 8.9 percent or as many as 4.5 million Filipinos are unemployed, the highest these past years.