ARMM education officials get death threats

COTABATO CITY, Philippines - For rejecting recommendations from influential people and offers of up to P200,000 each by non-qualified applicants to permanent teaching positions, the lives of education officials in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) are under threat.

Among those who had received death threats via text messages is London-trained industrial psychologist John Magno, the assistant secretary for operation of the ARMM’s Department of Education (DepEd).

Magno led the committee that screened more than a thousand teachers appointed to teaching positions recently by the region’s chief executive, Gov. Mujiv Hataman, in a mass enlistment process following the removal of thousands of “ghost teachers” from the DepEd-ARMM’s payroll, which proliferated during the time of past administrations.

The hiring of new teachers was facilitated based on qualifications, individual teaching proficiency tests, and willingness to work in remote areas and stay in poor, underdeveloped communities.

Also under threat is the region’s education secretary, lawyer Jamar Kulayan, who, along with Hataman, had suspended the release of maintenance and operational grants to dozens of non-existent schools in the ARMM provinces that past officials had used as "conduits" for public funds.

The region's police director, Chief Supt. Noel Delos Reyes, has deployed uniformed operatives at the premises of the regional office of DepEd-ARMM in Cotabato City to secure education officials.

Hataman said he expected his subordinates at the DepEd-ARMM to receive death threats after having caught the ire of many applicants, whose applications they turned down for lack of qualification and for having flunked in admission exams. 

"We are introducing reforms into the regional bureaucracy. It is but normal to earn the wrath of people who are against our efforts to professionalize the operations of all line agencies under the regional government," Hataman said.

The committee that supervised the teachers' selection process had also rejected dozens of strongly worded letters from influential persons, some of them incumbent local executives, endorsing applicants whose qualifications did not fit the standards set by the Civil Service Commission and the Department of Budget and Management. 

“To lead is to live dangerously,” Hataman said.

The more than 1,000 teachers Hataman had appointed in late May 2014 are now handling elementary and high school classes in  Maguindanao and Lanao del Sur, which are both in Central Mindanao, and in the island provinces of Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi.

More than 400 appointees to different career positions in line agencies of ARMM also took their oaths of office last Saturday in a symbolic rite at the 800-seater Shariff Kabunsuan Cultural Complex in Cotabato City.

Some of those sworn in by Hataman to office were insiders who were promoted  to higher positions- based on length of service, on-job seminars and special studies, academic qualifications and working attitudes- after serving in the agencies where they belong since the creation of ARMM in 1990.