MNLF vows to bring issue over SPDA abolition to OIC

COTABATO CITY — A "mockery" of the Sept. 2, 1996 peace agreement.

This was how the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) branded yesterday President Arroyo’s deactivation of the Southern Philippines Development Authority (SPDA), which has been implementing socio-economic projects in areas covered by the peace accord.

The MNLF vowed to elevate the issue to the influential Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), which brokered the peace pact forged during the term of former President Fidel Ramos.

The OIC, which has 54 member-states, including oil-exporting Arab countries, is also involved in the Arroyo administration’s peace initiatives with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

Cotabato City Mayor Muslimin Sema, board chairman of the scrapped SPDA, said the rank-and-file of the MNLF, of which he is secretary-general, believe that Mrs. Arroyo’s Executive Order 149 dissolving the agency, was a "flagrant violation" of the 1996 peace accord.

The President’s move, Sema told Catholic radio station dxMS, deprived the MNLF of its role, as clearly stipulated in the peace agreement, in the management of socio-economic projects in areas devastated during the Mindanao conflict in the 1970s.

Worse, he said, the deactivation of the SPDA, which has dozens of costly livelihood projects in the South, would displace its organic personnel.

The SPDA’s over 450 employees staged an indignation rally at the agency’s offices in Davao City yesterday and asked Malacañang to extend the SPDA for at least one year to allow them to look for other jobs.

They vowed to continue their protest actions until the agency is fully deactivated by June 30 next year. The President has formed a task force led by Presidential Assistant for Mindanao Jesus Dureza to oversee the agency’s final days.

Sema, along with at least five other key leaders of the MNLF, were installed by Mrs. Arroyo last June as members of the SPDA’s policy-making board.

He said the board members, among them chairmen of the development councils of Regions 9, 10 and Caraga, were not even informed of Malacañang’s plan to abolish the SPDA.

Malacañang meet

Highly placed sources in Manila told The STAR that EO 149 was "kept under wraps" until it was issued last Nov. 18, a day after SPDA board members met with the President in Malacañang and sought an extensive probe on the alleged mismanagement of the agency’s coffers by SPDA administrator Habib Mujahab Hashim.

"(EO 149) came to us as a surprise, a virtual bombshell," Sema said.

The President said the SPDA has to be scrapped because it was duplicating the functions of other government agencies.

The Palace order came as Hashim and the Sema-led board were embroiled in administrative and fiscal squabbles, accusing each other of mismanaging the agency.

Their bickerings worsened last month when the board unseated Hashim as administrator for allegedly costly transactions, including the procurement of a brand-new service vehicle without their clearance.

Hashim, on the other hand, accused the board of overspending in its regular conferences, travel and honoraria. He dismissed as "baseless" the board’s Nov. 4 resolution clipping his powers as SPDA administrator.

"If an in-depth, third-party probe is to be conducted, the Filipino nation will know that the troubles that rocked the SPDA were an offshoot of the board’s struggle for reforms in the handling of funds channeled to that entity and for transparency in spending these funds," Sema said.

He said the SPDA’s abolition only serves to condone the alleged embezzling by "certain insiders" of huge amounts of money earmarked for livelihood projects in impoverished areas in the South, and the alleged hiring of dozens of "ghost" employees and consultants without the board’s approval.

Sema said the MNLF would first elevate the "collective sentiment" of its members to the Joint Monitoring Committee, a tripartite body overseeing the implementation of the 1996 peace pact, before bringing the issue to the OIC. — With Edith Regalado