Cebu lauds NTF-ELCAC

CEBU CITY – Mayor Michael Rama lauded the efforts of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), saying it helped greatly in bringing government services right to the doorstep of the people and at the same time kept insurgency at bay.

Rama also cited the post-Typhoon Odette (Rai) response here as a clear example of taking relief assistance straight to the affected communities. “Rather than the people coming to City Hall, various teams from every department had been sent out to distribute cash assistance and rice subsidies at where our constituents live. We equipped our mountain barangays with chainsaws and generators, gears they need to start their own roads to recovery,” he said.

He said concreting the roads in the upland villages, opening more farm-to-market roads, and providing farmers with facilities to sell their goods, as what the local government did, helped alleviate their plight. “These are just, but simple peace initiatives that we, in local governance, can contribute by making our people feel and experience by themselves that the government exists to serve them, to attend to their needs,” he said.

Rama, who chairs the Regional Peace and Order Council, attended the NTF-ELCAC’s online meeting recently which was attended by representatives from the Joint Regional Task Forces who discussed the gains and setbacks starting in 2018 and mapped out the “way forward”.

He said public officials need to go back to the basics of public service in plotting the direction in the years to come to address the decades-old insurgency problem in the country. With the NTF-ELCAC’s effort to review actions taken over the past four years from 2018, Rama said he is optimistic the mission of the government “may result in more relevant and meaningful initiatives borne from love, those that matter to the most vulnerable to any armed conflict.”

NTF-ELCAC is the Whole-of-Nation approach in defeating the local communist rebel group and obtaining a sustainable and inclusive peace throughout the country.

On December 2018, President Rodrigo Duterte issued Executive Order 70 synchronizing the government’s instrumentalities of power with the capabilities of private sector stakeholders to end more than five decades of atrocities committed by the New People’s Army rebels, the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines, which has been waging a violent campaign to overthrow the democratic government. 

Unlike in the past, when local chief executives left the insurgency problem solely to the military and police, Duterte’s Executive Order 70 is the collaboration of various government agencies and their corresponding units at all levels, providing practical solutions to solve issues on the ground. (John Rey Saavedra)