Tiwala at Dasal

After that glitzy presentation of the government’s Build Build Build program at Conrad Hotel and the various summits and congresses on the infra program, are they finally moving? That’s the most important question of the day.

The safest answer is… it’s difficult to say. Between the press release and the groundbreaking could take almost an entire term, as what happened in the last administration.

Last week, DOTr inaugurated the new Palawan International Airport. But that is a leftover project of the previous administration. The reason it moved efficiently is largely because the Koreans basically called the shots on the project.

It was financed by Korean ODA with Korean contractors. It took a long while for the DOTC under Abaya to get it going. But when it finally managed to get its act together on this project, we didn’t hear much about it again until the Koreans were ready to inaugurate. DOTr should be embarrassed to claim any credit for its inauguration.

Indeed, there is still one more left over project in the aviation sector that should have been inaugurated in first quarter of this year but reset to the third or even last quarter. The project was supposed to have been operational in 2015 but a delay was caused by a long drawn out review ordered by Mar Roxas.

 When I visited this new world class air navigation control system last year, they told me they would be ready to inaugurate it by January this year. The January became end-June and latest I heard sometime later this year.

It is almost done except that they are having problems with the last component of radars that are supposed to be in troublesome areas in Zamboanga. Last I heard, the contractor got Iraqi engineers to work on it. They were the only nationality brave enough to work there.

DOTr broke ground in the LRT-1 extension to Cavite last week. This had been a troublesome project that several administrations tried to do but failed.

The project was finally awarded to a MetroPacific-Ayala consortium in the waning months of the last administration. It now has former DPWH Sec. Babes Singson on top of it.

I am confident that with Babes there, the project will move. It had serious problems with right of way acquisition.

Some Cavite politicians supposedly got involved in it during the P-Noy watch and they ended up buying property that’s not the correct right of way. People’s money wasted but par for the course.

This project could have been a good example of a hybrid PPP. But a good hybrid PPP calls for government to work on the parts involving big capex investments such as the concrete carriageway and let the private sector take care of O and M and in this case also the rolling stock.

In the LRT-1 extension, the private sector is building the superstructure as well as doing O and M. But government is buying the rolling stock via ODA from Japan.

It would have been better if the private sector consortium took care of the rolling stock because they will have to harmonize that with the existing rolling stock when they operate the system. And they will not be limited to manufacturers from the donor country that may not be the best.

Government is also better situated to build the superstructure because it is responsible to provide right of way, a major concern. It also involves high capex that is better financed by ODA which government has access to.

As it also happened, bidding out the rolling stock came into problems because of the high Japanese content required by JICA. No Japanese company can meet it because they are busy with the Olympics.

JICA belatedly agreed to lower the Japanese content requirement but there was a failure to bid out the trains as scheduled. If the trains are not delivered on time, our government will have to compensate the MPIC-Ayala consortium.

Then, there is another problem I heard: only two bidders qualified out of four that bought bidding documents.

Thus, only Marubeni-Rotem and Mitsubishi-CAF will bid to supply the train cars. It looks like Rotem doesn’t have a good reputation in manufacturing such rail cars. Here is what a specialized website on trains in Australia found out:

“It turns out that Hyundai Rotem is infamous for building trains which have made headlines for all the wrong reasons. In fact, the company is in the media spotlight in the US, Korea and the Ukraine for their manufacturing standards including mechanical malfunctions, fatigue cracks and defective brakes.

“In Philadelphia, nearly all of the new intercity fleet made by Hyundai Rotem had to be taken out of service due to shoddy welding. According to media reports, fatigue cracks were found on almost all of the new 120 Silverliner V railcars. For commuters, it’s creating a transport nightmare, with nearly a third of the fleet (more than 13,000 seats) out of action during the peak summer months.

“In Boston, a Hyundai Rotem fleet of rail cars was delivered 2½ years behind schedule and is now ‘so plagued by mechanical, engineering, and software problems that it has to be shipped to a facility in Rhode Island to be fitted with new parts,’ according to media reports.

“Problems range from faulty heating and air-conditioning units, to poorly constructed undercarriages, problems with brakes and issues with the software that controls signal communication in the cab of the train.”

Sounds worse than MRT3! I guess we cannot keep our hopes high those train cars will be delivered and made operational on time. The JICA ODA does not guarantee on time delivery and any penalties our government must pay the MPIC-Ayala consortium comes out directly from the pockets of our taxpayers.

There are also many more reasons why we should be worried about the performance of DOTr. It is essentially the same DOTC that in 2010 had 7 out of the 10 priority PPP projects of PNoy. None of 7 got completed after 6 years. Today, there are 36 projects in Build Build Build portal and 20 of those are DOTr’s.

Examining the details can raise valid doubts on DOTr’s ability to deliver. Take the PNR Commuter North - per BBB portal, its 38 kilometers to Malolos will be completed in 12/2021.

But DOTr also claimed in its recent presentations that they will complete the 82 kilometers from Manila to Clark in 12/2021. Are they saying they will start building the Malolos to Clark line while they are doing the Manila to Malolos? But the right of way of the Malolos to Clark has not been cleared of informal settlers yet.

DOTr Secretary Art Tugade pleaded during the Conrad Hotel briefing for citizens to give him their “tiwala and dasal”. I guess he realizes the impossibility of the promises he is making. He wants us to keep quiet for the moment and just pray he succeeds.

I personally like Sec Art and had high hopes for him when he took over from Jun Abaya. But he now seems quite overwhelmed by what he has to deliver. Because we had such a bad experience with the bureaucracy he heads, it is normal for us to wonder if our “tiwala” is deserved at this time. After all, “tiwala” or trust is earned.

BSP Governor

Congratulations to the new BSP Governor Nestor Espenilla, Jr. Congratulations too to President Duterte for appointing a career official with no political clout. My congratulations too to Finance Secretary Sonny Dominguez for nominating Nesting and convincing the President to make the appointment.

This is a confidence builder for the administration amidst current political turbulence all around.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco