Peace bears fruit in Basilan coastal town with footbridge project

From Business World (Jun 9): Peace bears fruit in Basilan coastal town with footbridge project

For the former combatants of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) in the island-provinces of Basilan and Tawi-Tawi, the struggle for Bangsamoro’s right to self-determination does not end with gaining political power over their ancestral lands.

The real challenge is to effectively bring progress to the people and sustain stability across their historical territories.

Bara S. Jikiri, a former MNLF junior officer, once led hundreds of Moro fighters at the height of the Moro revolution in Basilan in 1970s. His new battle, he said, is to advance the welfare of the Moro natives without the use of guns.

“The aspiration of having a genuine governance over our ancestral lands does not exclusively lie on how well you fought for it, but how will you bring the needed humanitarian progress to our fellow Bangsamoro people and non-Moros residing in our areas,” Mr. Jikiri said in the vernacular.

“But the word ‘progress’ is not only confined to the economic aspect alone. Progress means people can live devoid of fear; children can be children; and society is stable,” he added.

Mr. Jikiri said the best legacy his generation could leave are improvements on the lives of the Bangsamoro people -- the very constituents to whom the Moro fighters dedicated their quest for genuine self-rule.

“That kind of legacy is still a challenge for us to fully realize. Gradually, we are living that dream by engaging with proper government agencies in bringing the needed developmental projects to our communities,” said.

Mr. Jikiri is now a village councilor of Barangay Port Holland in the town of Maluso in Basilan.

He and other leaders are helping bring progress to the community by rehabilitating their community’s footbridges, which are fast becoming unreliable. Viewed from afar, Port Holland, which faces Sulu province, looks like a typical fishing community.

Up close, however, one can see that the houses are built on stilts connected by a complex network of wobbly footbridges that are the soul of the community.

The vulnerability of the wooden footbridges makes life perilous for the residents.

Fishers in the village have to depend on small diesel motor boats to transport their catch.

Abdurahman Minong, the barangay chairman, noted that a huge portion of the fishers’ income is eaten up by high operating cost in transporting their catch since the wooden footbridges could not bear heavy loads.

“Many of the footbridges here are dilapidated. It has been worn out over the years. The maintenance and repair, required every two to three years, are also costly. The wooden bridges even pose dangers to the residents here, especially to the children,” said Mr. Minong.

Gajer S. Jamadin of village youth sector lamented that before the construction of the rock causeways, several students failed to perform well in schools as they face difficulties in crossing the footbridges when heading to schools. This is eminent especially during bad weather, where seawater rises, which then submerged large portions of the age-old footbridges, making it impassable.

“There are instances where elementary students fell on those footbridges. Those incidents caused not only physical injuries but trauma to the children. Some have even lost their desire to go to school simply because they are afraid of crossing those unstable footbridges,” he narrated.

Sitticalma Mangsan, who leads the women’s group in the village, said the narrow footbridges sometimes trigger conflict among the villagers. “The wooden bridges are quite narrow. When someone is in a hurry and carries heavy loads and chance upon a resident who is also walking in an opposite direction, chances are conflict will erupt,” she recounted.

With the entry of Pamana (Payapa at Masaganang Pamayanan), one of the government’s key developmental programs in conflict-affected areas, concrete causeways were built to replace the wooden footbridges, providing stable links among the houses.

After Mr. Minong met with the Pamana area managers, he immediately called a meeting with the local community. “We (residents) immediately convened and proposed an infrastructure project that will ease the burden of the villagers, and that is to have safe and stable access roads within the community,” Mr. Minong said.

The swampy coastal village is one of the many in Basilan province that the national government is providing assistance to through Pamana, an initiative of the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process and its partner government agencies.

The program, which was launched after Benigno S. C. Aquino III assumed the presidency in 2010, has been providing vital developmental projects in areas that have been impoverished due to armed conflict.

For the autonomous Muslim region, the implementation of Pamana programs is part of the government’s lasting commitment to the Final Peace Agreement it had signed with the MNLF in 1996. With the program in full swing, residents of Port Holland worked together to construct several causeways using boulders, sand and cement.

The paths are more than a meter wide and could accommodate a tricycle transporting goods around the village. Each rock causeway stands more than four meters long to prevent it from submerging during high tide. Since it is made of concrete, it can withstand strong waves even during bad weather. “We use a portion of our annual barangay budget as our counterpart to finance the rock causeways. This is to augment the P1.5 million that the Pamana program provided us for the constructions,” Mr. Minong said.

http://www.bworldonline.com/content.php?section=Nation&title=Peace-bears-fruit-in-Basilan-coastal-town-with-footbridge-project&id=88844