Seaside Maluso town recovering from shabu bastion image

COTABATO CITY --- Efforts to rebuild into a peaceful town the shabu capital of Basilan is gaining headway and stakeholders are expecting livelihood opportunities to come along as the situation in the area improves.The first termer mayor of the once troubled seaside Maluso town, Hanie Bud, and Gov. Mujiv Hataman of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao launched on Tuesday morning the construction of a municipal government center as a service facet that local residents can rely on.Besides being the shabu capital of Basilan, Maluso also accounted for most number of deadly clan wars in the province in past years.Records obtained from the Police Regional Office-ARMM indicated that it was from Maluso where drug lords distributed to different towns no less than P100 million worth of shabu monthly before President Rodrigo Duterte was elected in May 2016.Chief Superintendent Graciano Mijares of PRO-ARMM said Tuesday security in Maluso has improved in the past two years owing to the hands-on involvement now of local officials in municipal governance.Past municipal officials were habitually absent from office, virtually detached from the local communities.Bud, who was ARMM’s regional ports manager before he was elected mayor in 2016, said Hataman’s office allocated P50 million for the construction of their new government center.He said the local government unit of Maluso will provide a P3 million counterpart for the project.Bud said the office of Basilan Gov. Jim Salliman will also help the Maluso LGU construct a covered court worth P3 million and a rehabilitation facility for reforming former drug dependents costing P2.5 million. Our LGU do not have the fiscal capability to put up these infrastructures which we need to improve governance in this town, now rising from conflicts and underdevelopment, Bud said.Maluso was a major port enclave in the 1960s, whose seacoasts foreign logging firms used as transshipment point for premium grade timbers exported abroad.Residents of Maluso, home to mixed Muslim and Christian groups, rely mainly on farming and deep-sea fishing as means of livelihood.Bud said his constituents are certain the completion of their P53 million worth government center will improve the local business climate. We shall have better livelihood opportunities for our people once all of these infrastructure projects are in place, he said.Local tourists, some of them from Basilan’s neighboring cities of Isabela and Lamitan, have been frequenting the Langas beach on a small island off Maluso’s capital lately, a consequence of the restoration of normalcy in the municipality.Bud said he is grateful to the Army’s 104thBrigade, the Basilan provincial police and the ARMM’s regional peace and order council for helping their LGU restore law and order in Maluso.Smugglers had used the seacoasts of Maluso in the past as landing sites for contraband, such as imported cigarettes and other untaxed merchandise procured from Malaysia and Indonesia, which they sold to buyers in the municipality and nearby areas.Bud said they are also thankful to the ARMM government for connecting hinterland barangays in Maluso to the P1 billion worth Basilan transcentral road that would cut through mountains in the center of the island province.Engineers are certain the transcentral road, whose construction is being supervised by Basilan’s district engineer, Soler Undug, shall be completed before end of 2019.The thoroughfare will traverse Basilan’s Sampinit Complex, the only remaining bastion now of the Islamic State-inspired Abu Sayyaf.Gen. Juvymax Uy of the 104thBrigade said Tuesday the strength of the Abu Sayyaf in Basilan had been dramatically marginalized in recent months due to the construction by the ARMM government of high-ticket overland arterial networks now cross-crossing once hostile territories in the island province.