MANILA, 20 April — Former OFW sectoral representative Isidro Aligada yesterday said migrant workers’ groups have to reassess their moves and come up with a strategy if they want to capture party-list seats in Congress.
He said he is arranging a gathering of leaders of the OFW participating in the party-list election on May 14 to analyze past mistakes and how these could be revised to the their advantage.
“Unless we get our acts together, we may never get represented in Congress,” said Aligada, who has withdrawn his Lakas-OCW group from the May 14 polls after realizing it was in for another futile campaign.
Aligada, who worked in Jeddah before he was tapped by then President Fidel Ramos to join the government, said that apart from the need to raise funds to finance their campaign, he also wanted cleanse Lakas-OCW of some non-OFWs. “We want to have a pristine party whose membership directory are all composed of OFWs,” he told Arab News.
Aligada said a study by the Ateneo Research Group shows why OFW groups need to put up a “united front.”
The study found that there were six participants in the overseas sector race, namely, the OCW-Unifil, Lakas-OCW, BISA, ABB, P.O.P., and POWER.
OCW-Unifil got the largest share of votes for the overseas sector at 30 percent (100,120 votes), Lakas-OCW got 29 percent (90,264 votes), ABB got 17 percent (53,356 votes), P.O.P. got 10 percent, POWER got 9 percent (28,243 votes) and BISA got 5 percent.
According to Aligada, the votes garnered by OCW-Unifil did not even reach up to the required two percent of all votes cast which would have been about 850,000.
