Senator Aquilino Pimentel III Friday assured they would continue to educate people regarding federalism after a Social Weather Stations survey showed only one in four Filipinos was aware of the federal system of government.
However, the President of PDP-Laban, which has been pushing for a shift to a federal form of government, hoped Filipinos would not reject federalism once they became aware of how it worked as a system of government.
“Survey says many don’t know about federalism. It does not say they don’t like it,” Pimentel said.
“How can someone like something one doesn’t even know about?” asked the former Senate president.
Hence, he said, massive information drive was the solution to the “don’t know situation we are in right now.”
He said the information drive would remain on the lead in such efforts.
“We know we need to explain federalism to the people, hence we will continue what we have been doing as a party, subject to our limited resources in terms of time, manpower, money, etc,” he said.
Senator Francis Pangilinan, chairperson of the Senate Committee on Constitutional Amendments and Revision of Codes, said the survey showed Charter change could not be forced into the people.
He said the latest survey result was consistent with past survey results, which also showed “little knowledge about the planned new form of government,” he said.
Part of the mandate of the committee, he said, was to conduct several other hearings during the sine die break as the previous ones were only on the issue of Cha-Cha.
“The succeeding hearings may focus on the actual Cha-Cha proposals, which we still have not officially received,” he said.
He also asked how will the public understand federalism if there is no clear and concrete proposal about this.
