MANILA, Philippines – Senate President Francis “Chiz” Escudero, a vocal critic of the reinstatement of the mandatory Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), said on Thursday, October 10, that the projected budget of P27 billion for its full implementation could be better used to fund other urgent government programs.
“It will be tough. To give you an idea of what congress will be weighing in deciding certain matters, P27 billion or P8 billion a year can fund a lot of things in Department of Health, in the Department of Education,” Escudero said when asked if the Philippine government could afford to fund the proposed mandatory ROTC.
While he opposed the mandatory ROTC bill, Escudero said he would not silence its advocates in the Senate.
“I am against that bill and in fact I was the chairman of the committee that reporting it out but instead of reporting it out I assigned it to Senator Bato dela Rosa. But my position against it does not mean that I will stifle its passage if majority of the members are in favor of it,” he said.
Senate Majority Leader Francis Tolentino earlier expressed confidence that the measure would receive enough votes in the upper chamber. The mandatory ROTC bill is one of the priority legislations of the Marcos administration.
“I think it has a majority vote last time I checked. But then again, my position in the Senate even when I first became a senator in 2007. The mere fact that I’m against it even if I am the Chairman of the Committee should not give me a reason or an excuse to not give that bill a chance which I actually did,” Escudero said when asked to confirm Tolentino’s statement.
The mandatory ROTC bill has been sitting in the Senate for nearly two years now. In December 2022, the House of Representatives passed its counterpart measure, a bill seeking to compel college students to undergo a two-year mandatory National Citizens Service Training (NCST), instead of ROTC. It consolidated 28 bills from various authors.
Dela Rosa, a staunch advocate and principal author of the bill, had said that instead of students spending so much time on TikTok, it would be better to put them through military training. He also earlier argued that those willing to kill and die for the country are more patriotic than those who are just watching at the sidelines.
Meanwhile, Escudero noted that the Department of National Defense (DND) also opposed the automatic enlistment of students undergoing military training as reservists.
“Nais rin nila i-rekomenda na hindi raw dapat automatic papasok sa reserve ang mga ROTC dahil hindi nila kakayaning i-absorb. Ngayon pa nga lang daw sa ilalim ng NSTP (National Service Training Program) ay mahaba ang backlog nila sa pag-accommodate ng mga reserve na nag-a-apply,” he said.
(They also want to recommend that ROTC members should not automatically be placed in the reserves, as they cannot accommodate them. Even now, under the NSTP (National Service Training Program), they have a long backlog in accommodating the reserves that are applying.)
Escudero met with DND officials on Wednesday, October 9, to discuss the mandatory ROTC bill and other related matters.
The push for mandatory ROTC isn’t new. Former president Rodrigo Duterte also made a bid to make ROTC mandatory for all college students early in his presidency, but this plan fizzled out.
The murder of Mark Welson Chua, a student from the University of Santo Tomas, led to the abolition of the mandatory ROTC program in 2002. It became optional through Republic Act No. 9163 or the National Service Training Program Act of 2001.
Chua exposed the corruption in their ROTC unit back then in a write up published on their campus publication, The Varsitarian. – Rappler.com
