Why development should be in the hands of Bangsamoro themselves as the BBL advocates. In my younger days, one of my earliest job was as Development Officer II at the Development Academy of the Philippines in the office of the Executive Vice President, then occupied by Vanguard Boy Morales. I sit on meetings between Boy Morales and Marcos top man for Mindanao who is now a grand old man of MILF and one of its thinkers. Zealous to develop my on province, I worked on packaging a Lanao Integrated Development Plan similar to what was popular concept of development at that time. I prepared a list of development projects for Lanao which could be funded by the province or from other sources as the acting governor then was my uncle Brig. Gen Lao. After some refinements, our group at DAP was ready to visit the province to have an ocular inspection so Boy Morales approved our travel in principle and made it known. To my surprise, none of the members of my group wanted to go to Lanao del Sur. The next day, they offered me different flimsy excuses including their wives did not want them to go. I then said, why? Lanao del Sur is still part of the Philippines. It was an honest query from a novice technocrat, a 23- year old boy who was trying to integrate himself to a society that he feels is so different from his own despite his education from the University of the Philippines. Of course, the project died down and I went to study at the Asian Institute of management after that. The question is how can the people in Manila develop a place that they are afraid to visit? In my later days, I found out that even the COA auditors from Manila to these days manage to reach Iligan City and briefly in Marawi City only to take their lunch in order to comply with liquidation of their travel papers. Of course we can not expect them to scrutinize papers properly, much more to go out in the outskirts of Marawi City to verify that all the supposedly paved roads to specifications have none or few steel bars inside.
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 23:56:46 +0000
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