Palace to spend up to P90M for federalism information campaign
Malacañang has formed an inter-agency task force that would conduct a nationwide information dissemination campaign about President Rodrigo Duterte’s push for a federal form of government, his spokesperson said Thursday.
Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said the information campaign aims to educate the public about the federalism initiative pending in Congress.
“We will bring down our dissemination level to the level of the barangay; we will focus on training the trainers and we will utilize mass media as well for this dissemination,” Roque said at a news conference in Ipil, Zamboanga Sibugay.
“We repeat that the survey so far confirmed that there’s a need for dissemination in so far as it shows that the overwhelming majority still do not know anything about federalism. So we have accepted the challenge,” he added.
However, 69 percent of Filipinos said they had “little to no knowledge” about federalism and 55 percent they were aware of the proposal to amend the 1987 Constitution.
Roque said an initial amount of P40 million has been identified for the information drive, P10 million of which will be used by the Presidential Communications Operations Office for the production of materials.
The government may also tap the P50 million in savings of the Consultative Committee, the body that reviewed the 1987 Constitution, which will end its operations next month.
Roque said the task force met two days ago to discuss the campaign. — RSJ, GMA News