MANILA, Philippines—Some military officers are grumbling about losing control over a substantial amount of funds meant for infrastructure projects in poor barangays whose residents are vulnerable to recruitment by communist rebels.
The Aquino administration has scrapped funding next year for the Armed Forces’ Kalayaan sa Barangay Program (KBP), the supposed carrot in the military’s carrot-and-stick counterinsurgency campaign.
The KBP allows military engineers to put up schools, health centers, roads, water systems and livelihood projects in barangays with sizable rebel presence, in order for soldiers to win over local residents. Since 2008, it has reportedly received around P1 billion yearly.
In submitting his national budget proposal for 2011, President Benigno Aquino III said that under his zero-based approach, he terminated certain government programs, such as the KBP, because this “no longer delivered its intended outcomes.”
Military spokesperson Brig. Gen. Jose Mabanta Jr. Monday confirmed that the KBP funds had been diverted to other government agencies.
“We would welcome [if] these KBP projects [would] be continued,” Mabanta said when asked if the AFP wanted to retain the program.
Counterinsurgency
“The KBP is geared toward showing people in insurgency-infected areas that indeed the government is after their welfare...by infusing projects into their areas,” he added.
Mabanta said the scrapping of the KBP would affect the AFP’s new counterinsurgency strategy starting January next year, which would see the military focusing its energies on civil-military operations rather than on purely military operations against rebels.
New People’s Army (NPA) rebels might be emboldened to continue recruiting from poor barangays “because there would be no evidence of government projects and influence in these remote areas,” he said.
Poverty reduction
Before senators approve the welfare department’s 2011 budget, they would want to know how capable Social Welfare Secretary Corazon Soliman is in distributing and monitoring the P29.194 billion worth of dole-outs under the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino.
Sen. Franklin Drilon, chair of the Senate finance committee, said: “We are generally supportive; we just want more details to make sure the programs succeed in reducing poverty. We want to make sure the program is properly monitored given the amount of public funds involved.”
Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said that since the government was making huge sacrifices in infrastructure spending, education, rice purchases and hospitals to come up with a large allocation for dole-outs, “it is important that it is properly implemented so that this will really help in alleviating poverty.”
The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) is getting a 123-percent increase in its budget to P34.146 billion, with P29.194 billion going to conditional cash transfer (P21.194 billion), rice subsidy program (P4.234 billion), supplemental feeding program (P2.884 billion), and food for work subsidies (P881.219 million).
But Sen. Francis Escudero remained skeptical about the poverty alleviation strategy of the DSWD.
He questioned why the government had to cut by P1 billion the budget for 55 government hospitals across the country and four major hospitals—the Lung, Heart, Kidney and Children’s centers—in Quezon City while pouring it all on the DSWD which does not have the capacity to ensure that deserving poor families get the cash giveaways.
Defending the CCT
Soliman Monday told the House appropriations committee that the P21.2-billion fund for the conditional cash transfer (CCT) was intended to bail out the 2.3 million extremely poor households across the country by 2011.
She said this was the first time that a “large amount is being given directly to the poor.”
Soliman said she had been asked why they couldn’t go into micro-financing instead of the CCT.
“My answer is when a very poor family has a sick person in the house, the money for micro-finance will go to medicine. If a child wants to go to school and does not have slippers, he will not go to school. If a mother is made to choose between prenatal check-ups and food, she will go for food,” she said.
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