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BY IKE SEÑERES
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Mobilizing homeowners associations
(Continued from yesterday)
WHAT could be the justification for organizing homeowners associations? As it was supposed to be, the residents of barangay units are only supposed to be a few thousands, but now some barangay units now have residents in the tens of thousands. Somehow, that defeats the purpose of having closely knit and family based barangay units.
To be able to get back to what it is supposed to be, the short term remedy is to organize homeowners associations. As the law provides however, the residents of barangay units could call for referenda that would allow them to decide whether to break up their barangay into smaller units or not.
Call it homeowners associations, call it community associations or call it whatever you like, but we do need smaller and more manageable units in areas where the population of barangay units have swelled beyond a few thousands. As a matter of fact, these need not operate as political units, because no open elections are needed to select their leaders.
Aside from that, these smaller units need not compete with the political powers of the barangay leaders. The emphasis should be on cooperation rather than competition. If and when practical, these smaller units could even organize themselves into cooperatives, thus acting as economic units just like the kibbutz in Israel.
If and when organized into cooperatives, these smaller units could be formed into clusters of dwellings that function as local self-help organizations, wherein the members could help each other in producing their own food, filtering their own water, producing their own electricity and recycling their own garbage.
In theory, anyone can buy their own food if they have money, but as it is already happening; many people in the poorer communities are going hungry because they have no money to buy food. In that case, they may not also have money to pay for their water and electricity. Garbage is another story, because they could actually make money by recycling their own post consumer waste.
As it is supposed to be, smaller problems could be solved at the lowest levels so that there will be no overload at the highest levels where the bigger problems are supposed to be solved. That is what subsidiarity is all about.
True enough, we know that the bigger Republic of the Philippines is doing what it could to solve our national problems, but the fact of the matter is that each and every barangay is technically a republic in itself, because it is empowered by the law to function as such. In a manner of speaking, it could be said that the Philippines is a nation of thousands of small republics, all functioning as parts of the bigger national Republic./PN
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