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Manny
Valdehuesa .

IN Cagayan de Oro, large barangays earn tens of million in Internal Revenue Allotment alone. Add to it their share of real property taxes collected by City Hall from the buildings and real estate located in them (25%), the fees from quarrying, mining, or forestry production (35%) licenses and fees collected from cockpits, tricycles, and billboards—and you have an idea how much money they have for development, services, even enterprises.

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Projected over the medium and long term, all these total to hundreds of millions—or billions!—to invest in programs and projects, including low-cost housing, cooperatives, small-and-medium-scale enterprises. If the officials would only learn to plan or manage their assets and resources!

Payatas and Commonwealth in Quezon City and many other barangays, especially in Makati and Manila, earn many more times than that. One wonders if their inhabitants are aware or made aware of such huge funds in their local treasury—and to what extent the people are consulted on how they should be invested or spent.

One wonders also how such huge funds can produce optimum benefits without development plans. A community’s funds need to be managed prudently, not spent willy-nilly and without formally-approved budgets as most do. There are grants that flow to them from different sources, local and foreign, public and private.

Properly managed, leveraging these to raise more, there would be opportunities for local employment or livelihood for the idle or unemployed. The idle would not have to flee to the metropolitan centers and cause Payatas-style ghettos to arise.

There would also be less resort to illicit activities to scratch up a living. The cities would be less congested. Crime induced by idleness and desperation would be less of a problem all around.

The problems of a municipality or city would not be so intimidating if their leaders would only learn to disaggregate them and trace their specifics as to volume or incidence per barangay.

Take the problem of street children in Manila. Because the city consists of over 3,000 barangays, an average of, say, 50 street children per barangay will yield a total of more than 150,000 problem children—an intimidating number for the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) to tackle.

But 50 or so kids running loose in a barangay can be manageable—if both its officials and constituents are sensitized to the problem and pool their ideas and resources to alleviate it. There are corporate citizens and assorted institutions in them too.

The problem is, there is little or no political will, poor planning capability, as well as failure to mobilize local human, institutional, and other assets. There are institutions that can serve as resource centers for the Barangay Development Council. There are wealthy residents whose resources are untapped.

But the barangay government is largely preoccupied with politics and the game of patronage, with an eye to the next elections. They fail to fulfill their mandates and serve their constituents as they should. As a result, their poor performance necessitates intervention by upper level governments—in the process, burdening the latter with services and budgets that ought to be covered by the barangays.

Barangays should be properly-managed and lighten the burden of the higher agencies and government units. As corporations in their own right, barangays can do what any corporation can do. They can initiate revenue-generating activities including fundaising, borrow or lend money, capitalize cooperatives and micro-lending enterprises.

The professionals and entrepreneurs residing in them can help raise additional revenues or acquire equipment and facilities from foundations and businesses with socialesponsibility budgets. Affluent inhabitants and corporate citizens as well as overseas workers have potential contributions to local development but their equity is not tapped. There is no outreach program to entice them to help.

There is the potential for floating municipal bonds to finance viable projects. Investing the barangay’s recurring income or the idea of joint ventures with affluent barangays are not being explored by these public corporations. The involvement or advice of resident professionals working in investment, banking, or financial planning would enhance the capability of the barangay to raise resources and grow its economy. There are also civil society groups and agencies with resources to invest in local programs and projects.

Sheer political skill or bluster cannot build upon these prospects. The local experts in growing more wealth out of limited capital should get into the act. It’s their neighborhoods that are at stake here. And they’ll lessen the burden of the upper agencies and government units! Not least, their participation or involvement in their community would water down the local preoccupation with politics and power plays.

 

(Manny Valdehuesa Jr. is a former Unesco regional director for Asia-Pacific; secretary-general, Southeast Asia Publishers Association; director, development academy of Philippines; and  vice chair, Local Government Academy. He is chairman/national convenor, Gising Barangay Movement Inc.. E-mail: valdehuesa@gmail.com)

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