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A FEW
days before the Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan (SK)
elections on Monday, the National Youth Commission (NYC)
on Thursday said much-needed reforms must be put in
place to ensure the relevance of the SK, the country’s
only institution for youth-leadership development in the
community level.
Calls
for the abolition of the barangay-based organization are
also misplaced, according to NYC chairman Richard Alvin
Nalupta, saying that such a move would create a vacuum
and deny the country’s youths a viable platform for
community involvement.
“Abolition is not the answer, because there is a clear
need for an organization like the SK to promote youth
involvement and leadership development in the grassroots
level,’’ Nalupta said. “And creating another youth group
will just be like reinventing the wheel.”
Nalupta,
himself a former SK national federation president, said
the NYC has consistently maintained the position that
reforms must be introduced to ensure that the SK remains
a good breeding ground for the country’s future leaders.
Foremost
on the NYC’s reform agenda, he said, is to make sure
that SK elections are held regularly to avoid overaged
leaders from continuing in their posts. The group also
bats for the automatic allocation of SK budgets for
specific programs to ensure that priority youth
interests are served. “We must make sure that all our
young people would have their chance at leadership
development.
When we
postpone our SK elections, hundreds of thousands of
potential youth leaders are deprived of their chances to
assume positions of responsibility in the organization.
Leadership turnovers are disrupted, while those who
remain in their positions for too long become
ineffective and less enthusiastic,” Nalupta emphasized.
The NYC,
he said, would also like to insulate the SK from
partisan politics, and one of the ways to achieve this
is to prevent close relatives of politicians from
assuming elective positions in the organization. |
