High power rates: Alarm bells for President P-Noy!

I had a grand time reading the 25th silver anniversary issue of The Philippine STAR, which felt as thick, if not thicker than the New York Sunday Times during its heyday. It was great to read once more the articles of the late Sir Max Soliven and the late Ma’am Betty Go-Belmonte and Art Borjal as they related their respective stories of why they had to leave a very successful newspaper called the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and now I’m keeping these news clippings in my own personal files. Indeed, time flies ever so quickly. So let’s hope to see you in our next big anniversary bash… the 30th anniversary.

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With President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino, III’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) over and done with, we should be getting ready to apply full power and get this sick nation of ours out of the economic rut that we’ve been stuck in the past 25 years. But then House Deputy Speaker Lorenzo Tañada revealed something that many businessmen already knew… that the Philippines is now the record holder for having the highest cost of electricity in Asia!

We’re paying P8.14 per kilowatt-hour for power in this country. If you ask me, this report ought to sound the alarm bells within the Aquino administration to search for solutions to bring down our electricity rates.

I just interviewed my good friend, Cebu Investment Promotion Center (CIPC) executive director Joel Mari Yu and he told me that when you are courting foreign investors, they ask you three questions: first, whether you have stable electric power; second, what is the cost of that power; and third, whether you would still have that power in the next five years. Joel very clearly told me that for us Filipinos, it is okay for us if we are subjected to a one or two-hour blackout per day because we merely leave the house and come back when there is power. But to a foreign investor, a 30-second power outage means a huge business loss. Now we’re talking about stable power.

Where we fail terribly is in the cost of that power. Supposedly, the Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management Corp. (PSALM) was created to rationalize our power problems, but it has ended with P134.9 billion in loans and expenses which it incurred from 2007 to 2010. Add the reality that most of our regulatory agencies, which were created on behalf of the consumers, end up siding with the power operators. Mind you, this is not happening only with the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC), but it is also true of all regulatory agencies like the CAAP, LTFRB, NTC or MARINA.

This is something that President P-Noy totally missed out in his SONA and if he wants his economic team to achieve their seven to eight percent GDP growth targets, President P-Noy must seriously sit down with these regulatory agencies and perhaps remove the “utak wang-wang” that has permeated the minds of the officials of these governmental bodies so that they, too, must change their attitude in serving the basic needs of the Filipino people.

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Exactly a week ago, a good friend of mine suddenly passed away because of complications from diabetes. He wasn’t really as famous a person like his siblings. I’m talking about the late Emmanuel “Manny” Amador, brother of stage actress Pinky Amador of Miss Saigon fame, and nephew of the great Zenaida Amador who founded Repertory Philippines. Manny was a simple and humble man who rode the streets of Cebu in his Honda 200XR.

But to the Pro-Life movement, especially to the Task Force for Life and Family (TFLF), Manny was a giant. He was a proud Atenean who was true to the teachings of St. Ignatius, which is why he was staunchly against the Reproductive Health (RD) bill and could argue with anyone (including Fr. Joaquin Bernas whom he said is a brilliant man who lost his childlike faith) on its main issues from the moral standpoint, the demographic issues or prove that this bill is being foisted upon the Filipino people because the US State Department included the Philippines among the 13 nations that need to have their populations culled.

I came to know Manny when he gave me the facts and figures about the cheating in the May 2010 elections using the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines. That was because Manny was the IT head of the National Executive Committee of the Ang Kapatiran party. Just a week ago, Glenn Soco, the losing vice gubernatorial candidate in Cebu province, called me to validate what Manny had been telling everyone… that the cheating was through the electronic transmission via the PCOS machines because his poll recount showed a huge disparity when the ballots were opened and what were transmitted as the poll results. Indeed, why investigate the 2004 or 2007 elections when there’s a lot to investigate on the 2010 polls. We thank Manny Amador who fought hard against the RH bill and for clean and honest elections. I’m sure he is now with God in heaven. Thanks, Manny!

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