CH reminded of other urban poor groups

CEBU, Philippines - At least 10 urban poor groups staged a picket in front of City Hall yesterday to ask Mayor Michael Rama to look at unresolved issues of various urban poor groups and not focus only on the Mahiga Creek settlers.

The Nasudnong Katawhang Kabus Confederation, the umbrella organization of these 10 urban poor groups, said City Hall seems to have forgotten other poor residents who have been waiting for the city’s attention for more than a decade now.

Among them, the Kamagayan Homeowners Association, which has been in the city’s relocation site in Sitio Cubacub, Barangay Canduman, Mandaue City, for 11 years now, still deprived of asphalt roads, water, electricity and proper drainage.

Siony Buslon, president of KHA, said that they were promised developments by the Division for the Welfare of the Urban Poor, yet nothing ever came.

Worse, some of them who claimed having already fully paid for their lot said the DWUP refused to transfer the ownership of the lots because of payment issues.

They found out that their payment goes to the Pagtambayayong Foundation Inc. and not the city government, all the while they were paying their previous homeowners president who already passed away.

Their payments which amounted to about P2 million were not remitted to the City Treasurer’s Office.

The group showed all the receipts of their payment that was issued by Pagtambayayong Foundation Inc.

Buslon alleged the mismanagement of DWUP and their “cashabotan” messed up everything. It was only recently when they started paying to DWUP for their lot.

Pagtambayayong President Francisco “Bimbo” Fernandez said that he will verify the allegations of the KHA.

He said he remembers that the group asked for their assistance to build houses which they granted under their housing program.

Fernandez said that they built the houses based on the money that was remitted to them. He said that if they received P2 million as alleged, it only means that they built only P2 million worth of houses in the relocation site.

Fernandez said that it is already the responsibility of the DWUP to collect the payment for the lot.

The lot in Canduman was purchased by the city government through a grant from deposed president Joseph Estrada. When the residents transferred there, Fernandez said, the leader of the group came to Pagtambayayong to seek assistance to build their houses.

Other concerns raised by the protesters are the alleged corruption in DWUP by its officials.

The mayor told them that the DWUP has already been taken care of because he instructed the new DWUP Chief Collin Rosell to investigate and correct the alleged anomalies in the division.

Meanwhile, the Partido ng Manggagawa called on the government to create a public employment program in response to the worsening unemployment under the administration of President Benigno Aquino III.

This after the recent Social Weather Station survey showed that an additional one million Filipinos lost their jobs since November, which is in addition to more than a million more unemployed Filipinos since Aquino took office.

PM-Cebu spokesman Dennis Derige said aside from a public employment program, PM is calling on the government to discourage retrenchments and curb contractualization as immediate steps and then shift to a strategic policy of strengthening the local economy to generate jobs.

Derige said that the public employment program should not be limited to street cleaning and whitewashing walls but must include restoring the environment and building housing for the poor aside from the usual public works projects.

“Given the sorry state of the environment and the backlog in public housing, just these two sectors are significant enough to provide millions of jobs for a start,” Derige said.

He added that the strategic solution to the unemployment and underemployment problem is to strengthen the local economy instead of weakening it by liberalization, privatization and deregulation.  (FREEMAN)