Sultan Kudarat YouTube Profile

I checked YouTube for videos on Kulaman, and I didn't find anything worth your time. I chanced upon, however, a two-part profile video of Sultan Kudarat Province. It was created by the provincial government and uploaded three years ago.

The first video opens with the words "The land of one hundred caves, wonderful falls, and beaches. This is also the number one producer of quality coffee in the country . . ." The parts about caves and coffee are referring largely to Senator Ninoy Aquino, my hometown.



Senator Ninoy Aquino, however, is not expressly mentioned until 7:41. The narrator says the municipality has the smallest something. I can't figure out the word, for the life of me. While the narrator talks about our town, the screen shows the facade of our municipal hall (yes, the one that looks like a three-room elementary school). The camera then pans to the bronze bust of the good senator in front of the building.

Perhaps the most interesting information I learned from the video is the classification of the people of Sultan Kudarat by ethnicity and religion. According to the video, Hiligaynon speakers compose 41.06 percent of the population; Maguindanoans, 21.28 percent; and Ilocanos, 15.03 percent. Roman Catholics dominate the population, at 56 percent, followed by Muslims, at 23 percent.

The first part of the second video is rather boring, for it deals mostly with economic figures. The narrator specifies how many hectares of fishing grounds the province has, how many metric tons of rice and corn it produces, and the like. My interest was roused again when tourist destinations were discussed. I was fascinated, and excited, at the mention of "one hundred caves that contains [sic] burial urns in Senator Ninoy Aquino."



I had assumed that the caves of Kulaman had been swept clean of its Manobo limestone jars. I am now wondering if some caves have not been looted and the local government is implementing some program to preserve them. The video ends with some shots of lovely waterfalls. I don't know where they are, however, and I've never been to them.

Poverty in Kulaman

More than week ago, I created a post stating that Senator Ninoy Aquino is the poorest town in Region 12. The data were taken twelve years ago by the National Statistical Coordination Board. I rummaged through the agency's website again to look for more recent poverty statistics, and good news, my poor little town is no longer as poor.

Since 2000, NSCB conducted several more poverty estimates for the country. I can't find the results by municipality for 2006, so I will cite only the findings for 2000, 2003, and 2009. (NSCB's website could surely benefit from a little 5S.)

As I've posted, in 2000, Senator Ninoy Aquino received the dubious distinction of being the most impoverished municipality in Region 12, with 74.90 percent of its populace living below the poverty line. T'boli in South Cotabato ranked next at 73.67 percent, and three other towns in Sultan Kudarat Province registered poverty incidence above 70 percent—Colombio, Lutayan, and Bagumbayan.

In 2003, poverty in Senator Ninoy Aquino had been alleviated, for only 63.63 percent of its populace could not afford basic necessities. The municipality ranked fourth among the poorest in the region. The top two belonged to South Cotabato Province—T'boli (66.50 percent) and Lake Sebu (65.31 percent)—and on the third spot was Malapatan (66.37 percent), of Sarangani Province.

In 2009, the ranking of Senator Ninoy Aquino improved further. The municipality now placed twelfth, with only 47.60 percent of the population experiencing poverty. The sad thing is that its neighbor, Palimbang, took over the top spot, with 63.70 percent of its residents unable to make ends meet. The town was eighth in 2000 and sixth in 2003.

The most alarming about the findings is that the municipalities that registered the highest incidence of poverty are where indigenous tribes live. Hopefully, the statistics will goad (or shame) the local government units concerned into improving the plight of their peoples.

Kulaman in Relation to Philippine Political Divisions

Kulaman is the central barangay of the Municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino, Province of Sultan Kudarat. For the sake of those who are not so familiar with Philippine political divisions, I will discuss them in this post and give some examples from around these parts of Mindanao. My sources for this article are the 1991 Local Government Code of the Philippines and the official website of the National Statistical Coordination Board, among others.

The Philippines is currently divided into seventeen regions. Government agencies (e.g., Department of Education, Philippine National Police) in each area are headed by regional directors. The regions, however, are not political units, since there are no regional governments (except for the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, which is ruled by an elected governor).

The regions are further divided into provinces, each ruled by an elected governor. In American setting, regions are loosely similar to states and provinces are similar to counties. Sultan Kudarat Province is part of Region 12, or SOCCSKSARGEN, which also includes South Cotabato Province, Cotabato City, Cotabato Province, Sarangani Province, and General Santos City.  As of June 30, 2012, the Philippines has eighty provinces.

The provinces are divided into municipalities, each headed by a mayor, and the municipalities are divided into barangays, each headed by a chairman. The country has 1,494 municipalities and 42,027 barangays. The Province of Sultan Kudarat has eleven municipalities and one city (Tacurong), while the Municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino has twenty barangays.

Municipalities are also called towns. Major newspapers in the country use town instead of municipality (e.g., “Senator Ninoy Aquino town,” not “Municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino). In this blog, I interchangeably use municipality and town, and barangay and village.

The barangay is considered the basic unit of government in the Philippines. The village chairman and councilors are the lowest-ranking public officials that are chosen through periodic and organized elections. The barangay, however, is further divided into puroks, or zones. Many barangays also have special zones called sitios. A sitio is usually a cluster of houses that is far from the center of the village and often bigger than a purok. In English, I think sitio may be translated as hamlet.

Cities do not fit perfectly in the normal political divisions of the Philippines, and their classifications may be confusing to an ordinary person. Most, if not all, Philippine cities have been created from existing municipalities. In contrast, provinces, municipalities, and barangays are sometimes created out of areas that were not previously grouped together. For example, the Municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino was formed from several barangays of Kalamansig town and Barangay Langgal of Bagumbayan town.

The Philippines has 140 cities, and they are classified as highly urbanized, independent component, or component. Highly urbanized cities are those that have an annual income of at least fifty million pesos. They usually have the same level of importance as provinces; the mayor of a highly urbanized city is independent of the governor of the province where the city belonged when it was still a municipality. General Santos City is classified as such.

An independent component city is similar in political status to a highly urbanized city. Only, the independent component city does not meet the annual income requirement. Cotabato City is one such city.

A component city is not much different from a municipality; the mayor is still under the power of the governor, and the registered voters in the city vote for the provincial elective officials. Tacurong, Koronadal, and Kidapawan are component cities of Sultan Kudarat, South Cotabato, and Kidapawan, respectively. Some government agencies, however, have a separate division in each city, regardless of its size, so component cities enjoy some independence from the provinces they belong.

Another complex political division in the Philippines is the legislative district. Each district is entitled to elect what is commonly called a congressman (more accurately, a member of the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of Congress, the Philippine lawmaking body). Each province, or city with at least 250,000 inhabitants, is entitled to have at least one representative in the Congress.

Though General Santos City and Cotabato City meet the requirements, neither of them doesn’t have its own representative yet. Instead, General Santos City is combined with three municipalities to form the second legislative district of South Cotabato, and Cotabato City, along with eleven municipalities, belongs to the first district of Maguindanao Province. Sultan Kudarat Province has two districts, and Kulaman is included in the second.

One textbook erroneously describes the Kulaman plateau as part of Bukidnon Province, while a few academic papers fail to mention that Kulaman is, at the present, part of the Municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino. I hope this post will help set the records straight.