E·N·Q·U·I·R·Y
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL
Asahan mo
Sunday, 04 19, 2007
When you ask a politician if he will indeed deliver, he gives the reassuring answer, “Asahan mo po.” Two years after the election, and the promising politician appears to have forgotten his assurance, and when you ask him the same question, he will answer your question, with a question: “May ipinangako ba ako, pare ko?”
These questions and answers were foremost in my mind when I confronted the people behind Asahan Mo, the newest party-list to be accredited by the Commission on Elections for the May 14 elections.
According to lawyer Oscar Yabes, the brains behind Asahan Mo, the party-list system is a social justice tool designed not only to give more law to the great masses of our people who have less in life, but also to enable them to become veritable lawmakers themselves, empowered to participate directly in the enactment of laws designed to benefit them. It intends to make the marginalized and the underrepresented not merely passive recipients of the state’s benevolence, but active participants in the mainstream of representative democracy. This lofty objective, however, has been desecrated and mongrelized into an atrocious veneer for traditional politics when individuals and groups that perennially dominate district elections were allowed the same opportunity to participate in party-list elections.
Of the sectors enumerated, the most marginalized are the persons with disabilities (PWDs) and the special children, or children with special needs (CSNs), estimated at 8 million to date. The term special children includes the gifted and fast-learners, but refers mainly to those who are disabled, impaired and handicapped and in need of special education as well as service for rehabilitation. To this category belong the children who are autistic, mentally handicapped or retarded, visually impaired, hearing impaired, orthopedically handicapped, speech defective, socially maladjusted, or emotionally disturbed.
Many of these special children grow up to be adults with no improvement in their situation, and thus become a lifelong burden to their parents, who must provide the love their children have missed from their normal peers. If not for parents, who else will have the patience, love and devotion to take care of a special child who is basically completely helpless? This dilemma comes particularly at a point when the parents themselves grow old and thus fearful of what will happen to their special child when the parents are gone.
PWDs, on the other hand, are in need of just as much assistance. Or maybe a little less, compared to the needs of CSNs.
Thus, Asahan Mo was conceived by a group of well-meaning individuals — themselves parents/relatives of special children, handicapped, PWDs, or just plain citizens who understand the problem and wish to be part of the solution.
Asahan Mo is led by Yabes from Moncada, Tarlac, who is himself a PWD. Non-functional in his right arm as a result of polio when he was two years old, Yabes fought this debilitating disease, worked and studied doubly hard to cope with the demands of normal activity, became a topnotch lawyer and never for once allowed the scourge of his disease to hinder his emotional and intellectual development. Yabes is the longest-serving secretary general the Senate of the Philippines has ever had. In seven continuous years, he had, by the very nature of this job, acquired sufficient knowledge and skills in legislation and advocacy for worthy causes, such as this one for special children and the handicapped.
Except for the Accessibility Law (Batas Pambansa Blg. 344) and the Magna Carta for Disabled Persons (Republic Act 7277), no other laws of consequence address the problems of the handicapped and the differently-abled. Asahan Mo is just about to remedy this situation.
Asahan Mo promises — rather, assures everyone — that should its representatives receive a popular mandate to join the House of Representatives in the Fourteenth Congress, Asahan Mo shall advocate the enactment of relevant laws that shall: establish at least one Special Education (SpEd) center in every school district; establish specialized daycare, recreation, cultural and IT centers for CSNs and PWDs; provide free special equipment such as wheelchairs, crutches, special toilet facilities, hearing aids and eyeglasses; allocate at least one percent of the national budget to programs, projects and activities for CSNs and PWDs; require schools to provide free tuition, dormitory, library, sports and other basic facilities such as elevator, escalator, wheelchair-friendly classrooms and corridors; entitle CSNs and PWDs to at least 50 percent discount in their bills for medicines, transportation, restaurants and entertainment centers; spend the CDF, PDAF, congressional initiative allocations for Asahan Mo representatives for livelihood centers and recreation parks for the CSNs and PWDs; require that 5 percent of all positions in the government service shall be reserved for qualified PWDs; give 100 percent tax deductibility of expenses on wages and facilities for CSNs and PWDs; establish a rehabilitation center or unit in national, regional, provincial and district hospitals; give tax credit, cash grant or subsidy for organizations and individuals involved in the promotion of the welfare of CSNs and PWDs.
Yabes, who was my editor-in-chief when I was associate editor at the UP Philippine Collegian, did not come to the name Asahan Mo by happenstance. In the 1970s, that phrase was a soothing Yabes catch-all to assure then Dean of Students Armando Malay, every time we came out with the Collegian, that he, Yabes, would not compromise Malay with the dictator. Yabes would always say, “Asahan mo, Dean, hindi kita ipapahamak.” This was a ritual every Wednesday, before we would put the Collegian to bed — and that was assurance enough for us to go on press run, without Malay even going through the text of the Collegian.
Asahan Mo, the party-list, gives us the same assurance, and we are banking on that. The Fourteenth Congress should be very productive in legislation for the disabled.
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