Cebu City mayor cites NTF-ELCAC for keeping insurgency at bay

From the Philippine News Agency (Feb 15, 2022): Cebu City mayor cites NTF-ELCAC for keeping insurgency at bay (By John Rey Saavedra)

Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama. (File photo)

Mayor Michael Rama on Tuesday cited the efforts of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) as a huge help in bringing government services right to the doorstep of the people and keeping insurgency at bay.

He cited the post-Typhoon Odette response here as a clear example of taking relief assistance straight to the community.

“Rather than the people coming to City Hall, various teams from every department have 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,” Rama said in a statement.

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 city government did, helped to 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 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 on Monday.

The virtual meeting was attended by representatives of Joint Regional Task Forces (JRTF) 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 expressed hopes 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”.

https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1167834