Senate body wants recall law amended

Do electoral protests hamper governance and economic growth at the local government level?

Apparently so, because members of the Senate expressed alarm yesterday over the 90 or so recall cases in various local government units (LGUs) across the country.

The high number of recall cases, they feel, indicated the need to scrap the Preparatory Recall Assembly (PRA) as a mode of changing government officials between elections.

Local government officials have complained that the recall cases have resulted in a double whammy for their areas of jurisdiction: LGU development plans cannot move forward unless local officials have assumed office and are put to work and potential investors are turned off by political instability, thus stunting an LGU’s economic growth.

The Senate committee on constitutional amendments, revision of codes and laws and electoral reforms wrote a report recommending the scrapping of the PRA but is still pending at the committee level, committee chairman Sen. Edgardo Angara said.

The committee report was drawn from bills filed by Senate Minority Leader Vicente Sotto III, Senate Majority Leader Loren Legarda and Sen. Ramon Revilla.

"We have to make voters directly responsible for recall initiatives," Angara said, hopeful that the draft report will be unanimously passed by the committee members and the Senate in plenary.

The PRA, he said, is now being used as an "instrument of political vendetta" and proposed that recall proceedings would be signed by 25 percent of the voters of the LGUs concerned. The signatures to be based on the last election and be strictly checked and verified by the Commission on Election