Davao City Mayor Inday Sara Duterte-Carpio, who leads vice presidential preference surveys, said on Wednesday, January 19, that if elected vice president, she would talk to Congress and lobby to push mandatory military service for all Filipinos reaching the age of 18 — male or female.

She said she would use the Office of the Vice President to urge the House of Representatives and the Senate of the Philippines to pass such legislation.

“Hindi po ROTC lang… Dapat po, pagtungtong mo ng 18 years old, you’ll be given a subsidy, you’ll be asked to serve our country, doon sa AFP,” Duterte-Carpio said on Wednesday, January 19, during a “Manila Virtual Caravan” which featured her running mate Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. and her several senatorial slates for elections 2022. Local government officials from the National Capital Region also joined the late dictator’s Son and Duterte in the call.

This was her response to a question posed by a Sangguniang Kabataan councilor: “As president and vice president, how do you intent to use your respective offices as platforms to spring young people into action and become part of nation building? Drawing from your LGU experience, are there programs you want to scale up?”

Marcos Jr., for his part, said he will focus on the creation of jobs for the youth so they can take part in the economy’s recovery, especially amid the pandemic.

The Davao chief executive also said she’d bring to the national scene Sangguniang Kabataan programs that focus on disaster preparedness. She said she told the SK in the southern city to stop creating basketball leagues, local beauty pageants and even dance contests during fiesta, as money from the government is wasted in them.

“We focused our SK in Davao City on disaster preparedness… [We] created a community emergency response team training. Before the pandemic, we had five batches, 200 graduates for Davao City, on disaster preparedness, fire, first aid,” the Davao City mayor stressed.

The Marcos-Duterte-Carpio tandem, dubbed as “UniTeam”, led the Pulse Asia pre-elections survey in December 2021.