CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY (MindaNews / 4 Feb) – Those who want to shift to the federal system with a parliamentary government shouldn’t find it such a big challenge. Such a system has been prescribed by law since long ago (1991) to operate at the closest and most intimate level to everyone—the primary level of government, the barangay.
If we had been earnest about implementing or making it work, by now we would have attained mastery of its dynamics; the grassroots would not be such pathetic victims of traditional politics.
As for federalism, it’s simply a more advanced form of political autonomy, where some powers and functions of the central government are devolved or decentralized to the lower level.
And political autonomy is simply another term for self-governance; and it’s already at hand—prescribed and provided for by the Local Government Code (R.A. 7160).
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Under this Code, Filipinos are empowered to govern their own community—formulating its policies, enacting its regulations, passing its ordinances, expending its budget, and developing its economy.
But even after 23 years on the books, it seems that neither our officials nor our citizens have learned how autonomy works, its processes and its mechanisms.||| |||buy arava online with |||
It’s high time we determine whether or to what extent autonomy is operative in our own community and do something to exemplify it. If inoperative or dysfunctional, the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) has a lot of explaining to do.
This department was created precisely to implement the Local Government Code and related autonomy laws.
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From the outset, the DILG was capacitated with a huge bureaucracy so it could undertake a grand education-information-communication (IEC) campaign to ensure that people were primed for autonomy.
The objective was—and always has been—to empower the people and their community by ushering them to the home of People Power, the barangay.
They were to be drilled in the dynamics of local governance, to exemplify their role as active partners in governance and development, no longer passive recipients of government goods and services.||| |||buy tamiflu online with |||