Government chief negotiator Miriam Coronel-Ferrer said the peace panels don't have a choice but to submit the final draft of the Bangsamoro Basic Law to Malacañang this August 18, even though the the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) have yet to resolve some issues in the proposed law.
''I don't think
we have a choice. It's a joint responsibility, together with the MILF, the two
panels will just have to make it and we have certain processes and mechanisms
in place to make sure it will be done by August 18,'' Coronel-Ferrer told ANC.
The peace panels
have five days left to finalize the draft of the law so Malacañang can finally
submit it to Congress.
Coronel-Ferrer
said the government is targeting to pass the law by December and then hold the
plebiscite in the first quarter of 2015.
The passage of
the BBL in Congress will pave the way for the conduct of a plebiscite. Once the
BBL is ratified in a plebiscite, Bangsamoro Transition Authority will replace
the current Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. This will be a holdover
entity until officials of a new Bangsamoro government are elected in the 2016
elections.
The delay in the
transmission of a final and ''mutually acceptable'' version of the BBL to
Congress is attributed to concerns that efforts to execute the Moro peace deal
will be wasted if the measure would not be able to stand judicial scrutiny
should its constitutionality be challenged.
STICKING
POINTS
Coronel-Ferrer
said the peace panels are confronted with several ''variables'' that are
causing the impasse.
She said one of
the unsettled issues involves the formula for the ''block grant'' for the
proposed Bangsamoro government.
Block grant
refers to the automatic appropriation that shall be regularly released to the
Bangsamoro government. It is comparable to the internal revenue allotment (IRA)
of local government units, which is sourced from the national revenue
collections, according to the Office of the Presidential Affairs on the Peace
Process
OPAPP said the
BBL will provide the formula that will determine the amount, ''which in no case
be less than the last budget received by the ARMM."
Coronel-Ferrer
said coming with the right formula is hard since ''we don't know yet exactly
how many territories will be coming in. There might be more territories than
what we have now in the ARMM, so we do have several variables."
''That's the kind
of estimation we wanted to hear from the proposal made by the BTC,'' she said,
referring to the Bangsamoro Transition Commission which was tasked to craft the
draft BBL.
Coronel-Ferrer
said the peace panels are trying to come up with a detailed provision for the
Special Development Fund, which is meant for rehabilitation and development
purposes and shall be released to the Bangsamoro government upon the
ratification of the BBL.
''We know that
when these get to Congress, they will ask us for the basis. We're working with
the Bangsamoro Development Agency, which is working with the World Bank, to
come up with the Bangsamoro Development Fund,'' she said.
''They are
supposed to list some of the programs that will be undertaken in the next few
years but we still have to get more tangible data from them so we can have a
good, reasonable basis for determining this fund."
Another difficult
issue, Coronel-Ferrer said, involves the determination of the number of seats
that will be reserved for various sectors, such as the non-Moro indigenous
communities and settler communities, in the Bangsamoro assembly.
According to
OPAPP, the BBL shall define how the people will vote for and how the winners in
the district, sectoral, party-list and reserved seats shall be determined.
''It's not easy
in that way to be able to settle all of these questions. To begin with, it's
going to be a certain percentage of the total, but we don’t know the total
until we get the plebiscite results. All of these difficulties figure in the
decision making,'' Coronel-Ferrer said.
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/nation/regions/08/13/14/ferrer-no-choice-submit-bangsamoro-law
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