Presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte INQUIRER PHOTO / GRIG C. MONTEGRANDE
Malacañang said Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte and other local government officials should be the first to appreciate the value of the government’s bottom-up budgeting (BuB) system.
“I think Mayor Duterte and all other local executives will clearly see the advantages of the BuB. It has a simple principle—the people who should know what a town or city needs are its residents,” said Communications Undersecretary Manuel L. Quezon III.
The BuB is one of the key reforms of the Aquino administration that veered away from the traditional top-down approach in an effort to make the budget process more responsive and empowering to local governments.
“It has been showing that ‘capacity building’ is being built. And we believe that it is a good idea and that it would be in the interest of any administration, not just the current administration, to continue this,” said Quezon.
He was reacting to a statement issued by the Duterte camp attacking the BuB as part of the Liberal Party’s campaign kitty to elect Mar Roxas as President.
Duterte spokesperson Peter Tiu Laviña said: “Let us not be fooled by this. This early, Roxas is already trying to buy local executives by promising them rewards. He is as worse as [Vice President Jejomar] Binay, who is mired in allegations and cases of illegal wealth and corruption.”
Laviña said Roxas promised members of the League of Municipalities of the Philippines and Liga ng mga Barangay last week that he would allocate more funds for the BuB under his administration or P1,000 for every Filipino or P100 billion every year.
Laviña noted that the BuB was initiated during Roxas’ stint as interior secretary in 2013.
Over the last two years, Laviña said, 54,000 projects worth P74 billion have been deployed under the BuB but only 20 percent or 30 percent have been completed.
He said a third of the BuB initiatives were funneled to vote-rich provinces like Cebu, Iloilo and Pangasinan.