Manny Valdehuesa .
IT is sad that no local government today exemplifies autonomy or principle of subsidiarity—which states that nothing that can be done by a lower unit should be done by an upper unit.
Where in our country today can one find a jurisdiction where the people (constituents) and not just the officials are active participants in governance? Is there even one barangay that knows how to govern autonomously?
The ideal of autonomy—of a People Powered government—was what motivated the enactment of the Local Government Code of 1991. It was meant to empower the people and enable them and their community to assert their right and authority to establish an accountable, responsive government.
Towards that end, the department of the interior and local government (DILG) was supposed to have chaperoned our communities towards genuine autonomy. Its mission was to see to it that both the citizenry and officialdom comply with the Code’s provisions and related laws.
It was why from the onset of its creation, the DILG was capacitated with a huge bureaucracy. So it could undertake a grand education-information-communication (IEC) campaign to prime the people for self-government.
The objective was—and always has been—to empower the people and their community, to make of every barangay The Home of People Power because all sovereign citizens reside in them. The people were to be drilled in the dynamics of local governance, to exemplify their role as partners in local administration and development. It would affirm their role as citizens—i.e. the source of state sovereignty and government all authority. Thus empowered, they would be involved and actively play their role in the affairs of government and community. And they would not conduct themselves as merely passive recipients of government goods and services.
Empowering and enfranchising the people of the barangay was meant to transform grassroots communities into productive political, social, and economic units. It would vest the barangays with the personality and stature of a small republic. After all, it is populated by sovereign citizens; it manages its own territory; it is locally governed; and, though limited, its possesses sovereignty.
The result would have been to anchor the Big Philippine Republic on the small barangay republics—all 42,000+ of them—making of our nation a formidable bastion of democracy, liberty, and justice.
This transformation was necessary so that the old system at the grassroots—dominated by traditional politicians and their corrupt practices—would yield to the new regime of People Power and Assertive citizenship.
Too bad that no one, not even the DILG, nor Malacanang or Congress, saw to the Code’s proper implementation, if only to monitor the status of autonomy in the local governments. Because without experience in the practice of autonomy, there is just no effective basis for shifting to the federal system.
With the basically feudal way our communities are governed today, the proposed new “federal states” would only end up with the breakup of impotent communities governed and manipulated by the same trapos and oligarchs who dominate today.
(Manny Valdehuesa Jr. is a former Unesco regional director for Asia-Pacific and the PPI-Unicef awardee as outstanding columnist. He is chairman/convenor of the Gising Barangay Movement Inc.. E-mail: valdehuesa@gmail.com)
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