Marcos launches Kalinisan program

MANILA, Philippines — President Marcos launched on Friday the Kalinisan program, which encourages Filipinos to maintain a clean and safe community that he stressed is the first step in addressing pollution, climate change and even criminality.

Kalinisan stands for Kalinga at Inisyatiba para sa Malinis na Bayan.

Marcos made the call in line with the celebration of Community Development Week and Community Development Day on Jan. 6.

“My friends, let us see in our barangay the changes we want for our nation,” the President said in a taped video message posted on the Presidential Communications Office’s Facebook account.

“Let our barangays be the laboratory of workable ideas, a showcase of what we can achieve together,” he said.

“Let’s start with cleanliness and orderliness,” Marcos said, noting that Filipinos do not deserve dirty, dingy or dark communities.

“At the end of the day, it is not only modern equipment that will win the war against waste. It will be won by citizens equipped with the habit not to litter and whose allegiance to a clean and green community has become second nature to them,” he said.

“Our rivers are not sewers through which trash flows out to seas that have become cesspools of our waste,” the Chief Executive added.

“Because of plastic, they have become dead pools of marine life, cellophanes choking corals to death, microplastics ending up in the fish that we eat,” he said.

Marcos vowed to pour in more funds “for the last and the least of society,” but said the government can only do so much.

“We cannot deploy sweepers who will follow each citizen around and pick up every trash that is thrown,” he stressed. “We cannot spend tens of billions a year collecting garbage whose volume could have been reduced through individual daily reuse and recycling.”

Marcos also called on concerned agencies to include community cleanliness in the performance guarantees of local government units and provide higher incentives to cleanest LGUs and those that actively implement the Gulayan sa Barangay program.

He also pushed for higher incentives for LGUs that utilize the Motor Vehicle User’s Charge for the lighting of national roads and tunnels, as well as the intensification of the campaign against single-use plastics.

Marcos said community development encompasses not just cleanliness of surroundings but embraces a “long to-do list” that makes a village viable, livable, the best place to raise a family and to retire happily.

It includes children’s welfare, crime prevention, climate change adaptation, capacitating institutions to resolve local disputes, community health and nutrition, commerce and trade, the President said.

“Every day must be Community Development Day. And that is the principle we have been pushing under the Build Better More so we can easily attain a New Philippines,” he said partly in Filipino.

Marcos has issued Memorandum Circular 41, which directs government agencies and encourages LGUs to observe Community Development Week and Community Development Day in a bid to uphold and instill the “Bayanihan spirit” and the value of community cooperation.

Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin signed the MC on Jan. 3.

The first week of January and Jan. 6 of every year were declared as Community Development Week and Community Development Day, respectively through Proclamation 316 issued in 1994.