Basilan

Maluso: Poor Basilan town struggles to meet vaccine needs

Rambo Talabong

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Maluso: Poor Basilan town struggles to meet vaccine needs

FOCUS ON RELIEF. The local government of Maluso, Basilan, distribute relief goods, which is where most of its funds went to under the pandemic.

Photo from Maluso LGU

The municipality of Maluso can hardly keep up with the national government's requirements for vaccination. It has no storage facility, no hospital, and only one doctor and 46 healthcare workers for a population of 50,000.

As wealthier local government units (LGUs) secure supplies and arrange for the rollout of their COVID-19 vaccines, a municipality in Basilan is desperate for resources just to prepare for the arrival of free doses from the national government.

“Our town is really struggling. There is nothing left in our budget,” Hanie Bud, the mayor of Maluso town, said in Filipino during a phone interview with Rappler on Tuesday, February 2.

Maluso is a 4th class municipality in the southwest of Basilan in the newly established Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).

They only have one doctor and 46 healthcare workers for their of population of 50,000. There is no hospital, only a rural health center. If the center cannot handle a patient – say, the patient has a severe case of COVID-19 – the person would have to be rushed to Isabela City, which is 30 minutes away by car.

Receiving vaccines would only be more difficult. With resources scarce, Bud worries that the town doesn’t even have facilities to store them. This will force residents to travel far to reach areas that have them.

They also lack medical equipment to comply with the government’s checklist of requirements for vaccination centers.

“For a municipality like us that is barely keeping up with budgetary requirements, from human resources to facilities, we do not have enough,” Bud said.

Maluso’s is a story of how a municipality could hardly keep up with the national government’s requirements for vaccination. It is also the story of a town that has anticipated but was only disappointed by the promise of the new BARMM government.

When COVID came to Maluso
LEADER. Mayor Hanie Bud inside the municipal hall in Maluso, Basilan.
Photo from Maluso LGU

Like many other remote municipalities, Maluso lived in relative peace as officials of urban centers struggled to contain the first wave of the coronavirus in 2020.

Like many other remote municipalities, their peace ended with the national government’s Balik-Probinsya program – an effort that sent people from urban centers, where the virus had rapidly spread, to their homes in the provinces.

Twenty-six persons have been infected, 22 have recovered, and 4 have died in Maluso. 

The lockdowns were brutal to its economy, depriving thousands of residents who earned a living through fishing and farming.

With constituents stuck at home and jobless, the Maluso local government used its funds for relief goods.

By the end of 2020, only around P1 million was left in their budget, Bud said. They have been COVID-free since December 24.

“Our budget is depleted because it has been allotted for mitigation of the spread of the virus, and we squeezed it for relief goods for the underprivileged,” Bud added.

Since March 2020, the Philippines has been in various levels of lockdowns to try to limit the spread of the virus, causing local economies to crater.

In a recent study by Australian think tank Lowy Institute, the Philippines ranked 79th among 98 nations when it came to containing the pandemic. The Philippine Department of Health argued that the study failed to capture “the complex nature of pandemic response.”

Penniless for the future
DISTRIBUTION. The local government of Maluso spends most of its funds on relief goods for its poor residents.
Photo from Maluso LGU

Maluso only receives between P24 million and P25 million annually from the national government for their internal revenue allotment. Since the national government hopes to distribute vaccines from its stockpile by mid-2021, the municipality shall have received only half of its IRA by then.

Bud pointed out that around P12 million for their municipality is far from enough to prepare cold storage facilities, to buy healthcare equipment, to hire more personnel, and to prepare transportation equipment by the time of the vaccines’ arrival.

Unlike in other developed cities and municipalities, there are no privately owned storage plants and warehouses that the Maluso local government can tap. It has to build them.

Health centers have also been undermanned. The only time healthcare workers in Maluso were able to rest, Bud said, was when they were required to undergo quarantine.

Bud suggested that the national government also hire volunteers for vaccine centers, just as they commissioned over 50,000 contact tracers in 2020.

Despite the lack of funds, Bud said they still want to strike a deal with pharmaceutical companies just as other cities have.

“It is not good that we rely only on the national government. We also have to play our part as much as possible and contribute, even a small allocation. Let’s try to squeeze it in,” Bud added.

Disappointment in the regional government
AT WORK. Men deliver sacks of rice to a barangay hall in Maluso, Basilan.
Photo from Maluso LGU

In 2019, the residents of Maluso looked forward to BARMM blossoming after the passage of the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL). Two years later, they have only been met with disappointment.

“Although they (BARMM officials) are doubling their effort, we have not felt – us LGUs – the intervention of BARMM…. They have been there for more than two years, but they still have no tangible impact,” Bud told Rappler.

A Rappler report published on the 2nd anniversary of the Bangsamoro Organic Law in January detailed the BARMM government moving sluggishly to fulfill its promises. The pandemic further delayed the region’s anticipated rise.

In 2020, the BARMM government received a P63-billion grant, but half of it was left unspent by the end of the year.

The BARMM government only allotted P155 million for LGUs to respond to the pandemic. The provinces each received P5 million; cities, P2 million; and municipalities – 116 of them – only P1 million.

After quickly spending the small grant, the LGUs like Maluso clawed for funds to provide for their residents.

For 2021, the Bangsamoro Transition Authority passed a P75.6-billion budget. It has allotted P500 million for vaccine procurement.

Bud only hopes that the BARMM government considers their struggles when they allot the funds. They were already disappointed in 2020.

“If they had added funds, many could have benefitted by mitigating the spread of the virus. Our expectation then was for them (BARMM government) to augment the funds as support in our campaign against COVID,” the mayor said. “But there was none.” – Rappler.com

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Rambo Talabong

Rambo Talabong covers the House of Representatives and local governments for Rappler. Prior to this, he covered security and crime. He was named Jaime V. Ongpin Fellow in 2019 for his reporting on President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. In 2021, he was selected as a journalism fellow by the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics.