THE MOUNTAINEER

A benefit denied to Cordillera workers
EDISON L. BADDAL

BONTOC, Mountain Province -- On the second week of November, staffers of Pag-Ibig-Baguio motored to this capital town of Mountain Province to hand out multi-purpose loans to government employees but mostly to employees of the Dept. of Education and Philippine National Police.

They had with them a list of the members eligible in renewing their loans with Pag-Ibig. Employees from local offices and national line agencies rushed to the multi-purpose hall, government center to avail of new loans or restructure a current one. Once a member is eligible for loan, his requirements are immediately processed without much ado and on the same day, his loan check is handed. Besides being fast and automatic, the requirements were limited from the previous ones.

In a way, members were treated to a home service as instead of them of going to Baguio to file their loan application, the Pag-Ibig office went directly to them. Bringing the service to the clients’ backyard attests to the improved efficiency and effectivity of service of the lending agency.

At least, this is one agency where the evil of red tape seemed to have been neutralized. And during the three days that the staffers stayed in the province, many employees were able to get their loan checks in less than an hour or two.

While the computers churned out ledgers of members intending to borrow, two major assumptions raced at the back of my head. While Pag-Ibig is to be appreciated for having restructured its systems and procedures to serve its clients more effectively, I brooded that one reason why it resorted to this is to enable all eligible members to borrow from the agency.

Lending to government employees for their basic needs being one of the main goals of the agency, I hazarded a guess that the agency might be currently awash with cash. But its cash on hand might be mostly dormant as there might be a lesser number of members availing of loans than what it actually targeted.

What was intriguing though was that most of the members who borrowed were mostly from DepEd and PNP which has the biggest number of employees among government agencies, aside from the military establishment. If such is true, then the agency was trying to mop up its liquidity, hence maximizing the availment of multi-purpose loans by government employees particularly those from the two aforementioned agencies whose preponderance could more than make up for the non-availment of loans by employees from other agencies. Lest I be suspected of making wild and outlandish assumptions as to the financial condition of Pag-Ibig, let me say that the assumption at face value could be wrong.

The loans handed out were only multi-purpose loans. No housing loan was given, which supposedly is the main service of Pag-Ibig, to enable members to have a house and lot of their own. The problem with the agency is that, just like GSIS and SSS which are also handing out housing loans, the only collateral they accept is a titled house and lot or even just a titled lot where a house is planned to be built.

Unfortunately, for Mt. Province and the rest of the Cordillera provinces that have mountainous, rolling, hilly, steep terrain, only a miniscule portion of its area has been declared as alienable and disposable. As most of its mountainous, undulating terrain has an 18 degree slope or more, most lands in Mt. Province and other Cordillera provinces are considered watershed or forest lands.

And according to foresters with whom I talked to about the knotty 18 degree slope question, all watershed or forest lands are considered public lands or government lands and definitely not alienable or disposable.

As is commonly known, alienable and disposable lands are the only ones that could be issued transfer certificate titles or TCTs for short. Or they are the only ones eligible to be issued free patents by the DENR or CLOA by the DAR. Although many A and D lands in Mt. Province are located far from the populated areas, there are some which are located in barangay centers.

Alienable and disposable lands are classified into two types, agricultural and residential. Consequently, those whose lands are within the A and D areas are the most fortunate ones as they could acquire a legal title to their lands. Or if they have the so-called Torrens Title, the original certificate of land titles issued during the Spanish and American regimes, they could have it cancelled and converted to a Transfer Certificate Title.

My informants said some Free Patents and CLOAs have been issued to individual landowners in Mt. Province (and certainly in other equally mountainous Cordillera provinces). But the difficulty is that free patents are only accepted as loan collaterals after five years that it was granted while, on the other hand, the CLOA could only be accepted as loan collateral after ten years of grant.

Be that as it may, those with lands located within public lands are given a tax declaration for tax purpose although said document does not connote ownership of the land. It only indicates utilization of public land by the government for productive purposes for as long as it can allow.

However, it is subject to confiscation anytime if warranted by the government. As it is just a temporary hold on such land, it has no legal binding effect on the part of the holder.

Though beneficial to the holder in some ways, it is as good as useless if the holder is a government employee. In Mt. Province (as in other Cordillera provinces like Ifugao, Benguet, Apayao and upland Abra) many employees are certainly holders of tax declarations.

Although they could use it in availing loans from usurers, they could not use it to avail of housing loans from the Pag-Ibig, GSIS and SSS and other agencies like the National Mortgage and Financing Corporation. This is most unfortunate as monthly contributions for the Pag-ibig or GSIS are automatically deducted from their monthly pay. Neither could they avail also of such loan from the SSS if they are voluntary members thereof.

The question here is that while employees from Cordillera provinces are being deducted the same amount to the aforesaid agencies with their lowland counterparts as well as those from Baguio City, Tabuk City and lowland Abra, it is only the latter who are enjoying the benefit of housing loans.

This is because employees from the lowlands and from the specified Cordillera areas dwell in A and D territories and can secure titles to their house and lot. Employees in the Cordillera whose lots are located in public lands can never avail of housing loan from said lending agencies.

While it is true that tax declarations could be accepted as collateral by neighborhood usurers, local banks and coops, said agencies are comparatively offering giveaway interest rates to members. Hence, it is a sad testimony to the Cordilleran employees being deprived of what is rightfully their benefit being regular contributors of the Pag-Ibig and GSIS or the SSS.

The problem is that those who crafted the charters of the lending institutions failed to perceive this problem. As they were lowlanders, their mindsets may have been only directed to the lowland conditions. Thus, highland geographical conditions might have been shunted aside as their could have been no native representative to Congress then who could have fought for special consideration for Cordillerans, especially in loan requirements.

Or if there was one when the charters of the said agencies were being deliberated in congress, his voice or comment might have been drowned by the din of numerically superior lowland members. Worse, he could have been hectored as to raise a whimper against such inadvertent injustice.

In a way, this is one among many manifestations of prejudice against the inherent interests of highlanders by the mainstream. This is a poignant legacy of the Spaniards to the highlanders after failing to conquer them despite several attempts during their long occupation of the Philippines.

Such prejudice and uppity attitude is exemplified by a brash statement issued by respectable Filipino in the 1960s who once said that “Igorots are not Filipinos”. Then congressman Alfredo Lam-en bristled at such a slur and orated on the integrity and selfless courage of the Igorots against foreign invaders.

There is the NCIP Law which purports to give a CADT (Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title).But this is no help either for housing loan benefit from the said agencies. When I asked the supervisor of the Pag-Ibig team that came to Mt. Province if the CADT could be used as collateral for a housing loan, he answered in the negative. So from the point of view of the lending agencies, the CADT is not a title per se but just a certification of ownership based on the age-old, indigenous concept of land ownership and land use.

Recently,in a forum initiated by the Cordillera Green Network in Abatan, Bauko, a Baguio-based NGO involved in enhancing use and procedures in registering resources in one’s lakon/saguday/batangan, I gamely inquired if such procedures will boost the titling of land. They backtracked saying titling is not among the missions of the NGO.

It is high time that Cordillera congressmen put their best efforts on this. It’s time that government employees in the Cordillera should also enjoy the benefit of housing loan offered by said agencies like their lowland counterparts.

This is also to preclude them from being victimized by usurers in the neighborhood. Paging Cordillera Congressman, especially Mauricio Domogan and Solomon Chungalao, the dynamic congressmen from the Cordillera , to remedy this situation.

It’s high time that you take the cudgels for the government employees from the Cordillera on the aforementioned score. It’s a worthy cause as it will ultimately contribute much in uplifting the quality of lives of the Cordillerans, much more the poor employees.