An event that took place two weeks ago could have far-reaching significance for the country, owing to the size of the organization itself—if it could pull itself together and unite. In this age of global crisis, I certainly hope unity can be achieved. I refer to the recent election in the Union of Local Authorities of the Philippines (ULAP) where for the first time since it was founded in 1998 by then-Governor Joey Lina of Laguna province (now Manila Hotel president), the leadership was wrested from the League of Governors and Mandaluyong City Mayor BenHur Abalos, president of the League of Cities, was elected president.
The ULAP, the umbrella organization of all the leagues of locally elected officials, is huge: It includes 81 provincial governors, 81 vice governors, 120 city mayors, 1,511 municipal mayors, 1,631 municipal vice mayors, 16,718 councilors, 850 board members, 41,995 “barangay” [village or neighborhood district] captains and 41,995 members of Sangguniang Kabataan (SK, Youth Councils).
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There’s a report about a few governors objecting to the election of Abalos by 9 out of the 11 regular members of the ULAP board who head their own leagues and are entitled to vote for ULAP’s national officials. I suspect that the objection of a few governors is part of the normal resistance to change. There’s talk that the disgruntled governors would bring their case to Malacañang, but Abalos’ supporters are standing pat on their choice. I sincerely hope ULAP will be able to iron out its differences, as now, more than ever, unity is needed in the face of various crises the nation faces.
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Cecile Alvarez and I invited Abalos to our radio program last Sunday evening and he stressed that there is nothing in the ULAP’s setup that prevents a lower-ranking official from leading it. In British Columbia, he notes, even a councilor can head the counterpart umbrella league. It’s difficult to begrudge credit to Abalos, who was voted outstanding mayor in 2003 by the Senate and the Department of Interior and Local Government, in partnership with major schools, as he worked hard to get his colleagues’ votes. For instance, as City League president he conceptualized and carried out a cross-country caravan to link up the cities, bringing eyeglasses, wheelchairs, medicines, etc.
Abalos, a former congressman, intends to push this networking some more. For instance, he argues that garbage landfill, so controversial in Metro Manila, could be discussed by the various local executives in the regions, e.g., some areas in the provinces of Bulacan and Pampanga might welcome the refuse from the northern part of the metropolis to fill up some of their own areas, whereas provinces in Southern Luzon could accommodate refuse from the southern part of the metropolis. Then too, traffic apprehensions could be rationally approached through better coordination among ULAP members, so that a Manilan apprehended in, say, the northern province of Isabela could get his driver’s license in the city.
In these times of crisis, the ULAP network should be harnessed more effectively in the alleviation of poverty, the moving of critical commodities to the deprived areas, the lowering of the level of violence and crime, and disaster management. In the face of so many things to do, there’s little time for divisiveness.
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Talking of crisis, Cecile and I conducted another “paaralang-bayan” recently on dzRH (8:00-8:45 p.m. Sunday) with the director of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs), Dr. Renato Solidum as our guest. We focused on the country’s preparedness for disasters, especially in the wake of the magnitude-8.0 earthquake in Sichuan, China that killed 70,000 people.
Solidum, who took the helm of Phivolcs in January 2003, is a Bachelor of Science in Geology graduate from the University of the Philippines and obtained his master’s in geological services at the University of Illinois in Chicago and his Ph.D. in Earth Science at the University of California in San Diego. He toured us around Phivolcs where computers record earthquakes and cyclones around the world and oriented us on “Project READY,” which seeks to address the problem of disaster risk-management (DRM) at the local level, concentrating on the 27 “high-risk” provinces within the 2006-2011 timetable.
Solidum said that hazard-mapping has been finished on the national level and they’re now at the barangay level. The inter-agency effort coordinated by the National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC), under Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro, ought not to be just a DRM issue but a “development issue” involving various disciplines and stake holders. “We can get away from our reputation as among the most disaster-prone countries in the world, but it needs a lot of coordinated work among national and local agencies, as well as educating the citizenry in order to save lives,” Solidum noted. His office has prepared attractive information brochures in comic-book form that ought to reach the barangay level.
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According to Solidum, the exact timing of earthquakes cannot yet be foretold anywhere in the world (so don’t believe those texts), but areas where it is likely to hit are identifiable (this was borne out in Sichuan where more than ample warning was issued, but largely ignored). In the last 400 years, the Philippines has experienced 90 destructive earthquakes and 40 tsunamis, with the strongest quake recorded at magnitude 8.3 in southern Panay Island, destroying Jaro Cathedral’s bell tower. The strongest quake ever recorded in the world was magnitude 9.5, in Chile in May 1960, which triggered such a huge tsunami around the world that it reached the Philippines’ Pacific coastline a day later. Tsunamis triggered by local earthquakes can be deadlier. The worst occurred in August 1976 in the Moro Gulf following a 7.9 quake, with the five-meter-high wave killing 3,000 people and leaving 1,000 others missing and 12,000 homeless.
