Crunch time

It’s a breakthrough, indeed—the wealth-sharing agreement that the peace panels of the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front signed recently, hurdling the one big hindrance that had threatened to scuttle the talks just a few weeks ago. Earlier, the MILF had complained bitterly that the delay in the signing of the Annex on Revenue Generation and Wealth-Sharing was sowing frustration in its ranks and breeding doubts about the genuine sincerity of President Aquino’s administration to arrive at a comprehensive peace agreement for Mindanao.

But those doubts appear to have been laid to rest with the successful consensus reached by the two panels on the wealth-sharing issues. From reports, it took a record six days and some 12 hours of gruelling negotiations before the two sides agreed on a mutually satisfactory formula: The MILF and the proposed Bangsamoro to be created under the peace agreement will get 75 percent of taxes and earnings from natural resources and metallic minerals coming from Mindanao, and 50 percent from energy and other mineral resources.

Earlier this month, chief government negotiator Miriam Coronel-Ferrer said that there would be “more taxing powers and a more defined sharing of government resources on the whole, in keeping with the goal of having a strong and viable autonomous Bangsamoro governance.” The wealth-sharing arrangement appears to fulfill this aim; for one, it is said to be better than the current setup enjoyed by the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, which is funded only under a “line item” provision in the national budget, requiring it to submit annual budget requests to support its programs and functions. But under the wealth-sharing annex, the Bangsamoro entity will enjoy automatic appropriation, and will not have to haggle every time for its share of the national budget.

This sounds like a fair and just arrangement. All this time, Mindanao has suffered under the neglect and indifference of the central government in Manila, even as revenue from its natural resources invariably flowed into the national coffers. The ARMM, despite the billions of pesos poured into it, remains one of the poorest regions, its infants at greater risk of death and disease than in other areas in the country—the highest under-five mortality rate in the Philippines, in fact, according to government data. The poverty incidence is as high as 81 percent, with conflict and war further exacerbating the condition of residents in the area.

“Wealth creation (or revenue creation and sourcing) is important for the operation of the Bangsamoro, considering that the Bangsamoro territory is among the most underdeveloped in the Philippines due to the decades-old conflict,” the government panel said in a statement. The fiscal autonomy promised by the wealth-sharing agreement should, at last, help make the proposed Bangsamoro a viable, economically functioning entity, with the bulk of Mindanao’s resources tapped and enjoyed by the people of Mindanao themselves. “The resources under the disposal of the future Bangsamoro will give real meaning to its political autonomy,” said MILF chief negotiator Mohagher Iqbal. “Fiscal autonomy goes hand in hand with political autonomy.”

With consensus on the wealth-sharing issue arrived at, along with the earlier annex on transitional arrangements and modalities that was initialed early this year, the government and the MILF can now move on to the two other remaining annexes of the preliminary peace agreement signed on Oct. 15, 2012: one on power-sharing, and the other on “normalization,” which requires the decommissioning of MILF forces and other armed groups and the establishment of police power in the Bangsamoro domain.

To put all these developments in perspective: No other previous peace talks by the government, whether with the MILF or the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed and political wings, the New People’s Army and the National Democratic Front, respectively, has come this far in terms of common ground or workable detail. Suddenly, a genuine peace agreement seems more than a pipe dream. Despite the prickly issues that had threatened to derail the talks altogether, the fruitful ground covered so far by the two panels suggests that they are in a good position to achieve what has eluded this country for so long: a just, comprehensive and long-lasting peace accord for Mindanao.

It’s crunch time for the government and the MILF. May mutual goodwill and sincerity see them through to the finish line.