(Eagle News) — Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III on Thursday said that the Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) should be “open to changes.”
In a statement, he said this was to allow the Bangsamoro autonomy to “evolve by abandoning its mistakes and strengthening its positive aspects.”
“We recommend that lawmakers should look at past experiences in devolving certain basic services to learn from them and take into consideration these lessons when crafting the BBL,” Dominguez said.
According to Dominguez, the end goal of devolution or autonomy in the first place should be “to bring economic development to the people of the area covered by this arrangement.”
Unfortunately, Dominguez stressed that the country’s experience has shown that the devolution of functions particularly in the health and agriculture departments under the Local Government Code (LGC) has shown that this move hardly improved the public health status in the regions and failed to boost agricultural production.
Based on 2016 data presented by the Secretary, the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) had the lowest Gross National Income among the country’s regions.
He said that the per capita Gross Regional Domestic Product in the ARMM was the lowest, at only ₱27,345 in current prices, or only six percent of NCR’s.
“I hope that mixed outcomes of our experience with devolution will enlighten discussion on the Bangsamoro Basic Law. The first lesson, I suppose, is that it does take time to evolve new institutions of local governance into place,” he said.
He told lawmakers that “time” was necessary to “build capacity,” to build the “credibility at governance,” to “win a suitable credit rating” and to “demonstrate a capacity for exercising fiscal discipline.”
He added that like the rest of the country, the fundamental requirements of sustained growth such as hard infrastructure, new communications technologies and efficient administrative systems should apply in the creation of the Bangsamoro autonomous region.