Maguindanao Polloc Port bouncing back from mismanagement

MAGUINDANAO --- The once poorly managed Polloc International Port in the province is bouncing back, earning in only nine months the revenues it collected in the past six years.
So mismanaged was the port, located in a seaside district in Parang town in Maguindanao, by past governors of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) that its management office could hardly even remit P5 million yearly to the regional treasury in years prior to 2013.The ARMM government assumed control of the port from the Philippine Ports Authority after the autonomous region was established via a plebiscite in 1990.Fiscal records obtained on Wednesday from the Polloc Freeport Administration indicated that the facility indeed earned P21.9 million from January to September this year, short of only P11.1 million to offset its earnings for 2013, 2014 and 2015.Officials of the ARMM Regional Treasury confirmed the feat, based on remittance documents sealed with time-bound watermarks, filed from between 2013 to October 2016.Port collections remitted to the Bureau of Customs (BOC) in the past eight months also hit a record P124 million mark, about five folds larger than what the bureau got in shares in the past four years.Functions and powers of the BOC are not among those the national government devolved to the ARMM government.
Port Administrator Hexsan Mabang said Wednesday the earnings of the facility started to peak in 2013 as a result of the management innovations initiated by the office of ARMM Gov. Mujiv Hataman.Hataman first got to the helm of the ARMM government as an appointed caretaker in December 2011. He was elected as regional governor during the regional elections in 2013, reelected to a second term on May 9, 2016.The Polloc Port repeatedly hit the news in recent months after commercial vessels from Vietnam, Thailand, China, India and Singapore docked and unloaded cargoes from abroad. That is apart from Philippine inter-island cargo vessels that docked at the port too in the past three years, Mabang said.The office of Hataman had allocated P150 million for the improvement of the buildings and storage facilities at the Polloc Port.

More than three million bags of high-quality cement from Vietnam were brought into the autonomous region via the Polloc Port in the past 24 months.The cement importations were done with permission from the BOC and the national government due to lack of supply in many ARMM provinces where Hataman’s office has been implementing since 2014 more than P10 billion worth of infrastructure projects.Some P3 billion worth of construction materials from factories in different parts of the country were also shipped to ARMM provinces through the same route in the past three years. The Polloc port is now a booming transshipment point for merchandise from abroad and from different ports in the country, Mabang said.Mabang said the port administration office now boasts of an upgraded power generation system and a water supply facility in the port, improved on order of Hataman using allocations from shipping revenues.

This port will play a big role in the economy of Central Mindanao with the possible coming in of more foreign investors now that the Mindanao peace process of President Rodrigo Duterte is taking off, Mabang said.The office of Mabang has just beefed up security in the port with modern computer-generated surveillance camera network that has a five-kilometer focus efficiency radius. We can view from our observation post an incoming vessel even if still about three kilometers away, Mabang said.