DILG: COVID-19 response still the priority, not Charter change

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) maintained on Monday that the move to amass 2 million signatures in support of constitutional reform (CORE) has not been prioritized over addressing the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.

DILG spokesperson Jonathan Malaya assured the public that measures to address the COVID-19 pandemic remained the agency’s top priority and insisted that the Philippine Daily Inquirer article published last Sunday “gave a different impression.”

He maintained that Interior Secretary Eduardo Año had branded the article as fake news in an ABS-CBN news channel online interview on Monday because “we are not campaigning for Cha-cha (Charter change). We are advocating for CORE together with Congress.”

Based on 3 memos

The Inquirer stands by the story as it was based on three memos issued by Malaya, which he later confirmed and expounded on in interviews with this reporter.

“Ours is just amendments and not revision, therefore, not Cha-cha. It’s not even federalism. Your headline spoke of Cha-cha. There’s a big difference,” Malaya said.

“While we have a target of 2 million (signatures of support for CORE), that was prior to COVID and we have since scaled down considerably because all our efforts are now focused to defeat COVID. We are not actively pursuing it because all our field offices are focused on COVID response where we are a front-liner agency,” he said.

The May 11 memorandum issued by Malaya as undersecretary for plans, public affairs, and communications to all DILG regional directors and Center for Federalism and Constitutional Reform-accredited organizations encouraged “all the regions and civil society organizations to utilize our CORE website for the online signature campaign. The use of this accessible and reliable online platform will eventually help in promoting the campaign as well as gather signatures with more people at home.”

“The said online signatures will also add up to the number of collected signatures of the regions and civil society organizations, completing the target of 2 million signatures in July,” it said.

Amendments necessary

The CORE Movement claimed on Monday that moves for Charter amendments were necessary to address structural flaws in the country’s economy exposed by the COVID-19 crisis.

The group vowed to pursue the online signature campaign to gather 2 million signatures in support of constitutional reforms to make the country’s regions stronger.

In a statement on Monday, former Masbate governor and CORE Movement national chairperson Vicente Homer Revil noted that the pandemic had paralyzed the Philippine economy because the Luzon-wide enhanced community quarantine froze 73 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. He pointed out that current industries and development funding were concentrated in Luzon.

“Making our regions stronger by giving them development funding and authority under our Constitution as proposed by advocates of constitutional reforms will disperse the economy and make it more resilient in case of a repeat of a national crisis like COVID-19,” Revil said.