BACOLOD CITY – Will consumers of the Central Negros Electric Cooperative be made to pay for imaginary losses?

 

This was one of the questions that cropped up during the November 13 hearing of the Energy Regulatory Commission over the application of the local electric utilities firm to recover its losses from 2004 to 2011 amounting to more than P414 million based on a formula issued by the ERC.  

 

“There are no actual losses, these are just hypothetical losses or a loss of the opportunity to collect more,” Councilor Archie Baribar, who represented the city’s Sangguniang Panlungsod, said during the hearing presided by lawyer Reynaldo Gomez.

 

Ceneco’s proposed recovery scheme, which it plans to implement as soon as ERC grants it provisional authority, will mean an additional 23 centavos per month to be collected over three years from consumers it services here and in the cities of Silay, Talisay and Bago and in the towns of San Enrique, Valladolid and Pulupandan.

Baribar also pointed out that charging consumers “retroactively” is similar to recovering “lost profits” when it is in fact a cooperative that is supposed “to serve consumers and not make profits.”

 

 “This is hao siao; (ERC) is the one that made the formula, implement it and then it is also the one to judge on the application (of Ceneco),” consumer advocate Elinore Cabanilla said in describing the series of hearings that are being held for the first time here instead of in Manila.

 

“Hao siao” roughly translates to “fake” or “a farce.”

 

Cabanilla, considered a local expert on the power industry who represented the Social Action Center of the Bacolod Diocese, said Ceneco’s seeming “obsession” to maintain its Category A+ electric cooperative is linked to its eventual privatization as more and more big businesses are getting interested in the power sector.

 

Baribar and Cabanilla were among the intervenors that showed up during the hearing that was on its “expository phase” – the part where consumers and groups who are not classified as “intervenors” can ask questions to officials and representatives of Ceneco.

 

Lawyer Vicente Petierre III, who represented Bacolod Mayor Evelio Leonardia in the hearing, said it is “strange” that Ceneco is charging consumers to pay for the system loss that even its officials cannot understand.

 

“They want us to pay for it but they cannot even explain how much of it is technical loss and how of much of it is administrative,” he said.

 

“Technical loss” refers to what Ceneco engineers defined during the hearing as the loss in electricity during the process of transmission from the power generator to household users while the “non-technical” part, covers among others, power lost to pilferage.

 

“Ceneco itself is at a loss over the system loss and but they want us consumers to just swallow it hook, line and sinker,” Petierre, who is also chief of the city’s permits and licensing division, said.

 

But Ceneco general manager Sulpicio Lagarde disputed Baribar’s observations, saying that the system loss is “an actual loss” although he himself could not really describe the template or the formula implemented by the ERC as totally fair to the consumers.

 

“Even the electric cooperatives are questioning it,” he said, but Ceneco has to recover what he called as “losses” to finance the upgrading of their system.

 

“We were not able to realize additional income; had we collected since 2004, that money could have been used for our projects that would mean better service for the consumers,” Lagarde added.

 

 

The Ceneco official also pointed out that they have to recover the system loss to avoid borrowing money for their system upgrade amid questions that the cooperative plans to borrow P1 billion from the National Electrification Administration.

 

Printed copies of Ceneco’s Powerpoint presentation showed that the computation of its “over/under recoveries” was calculated by summing up its generation, transmission, system loss, lifeline and Inter-Class Cross Subsidy Removal over or under-recoveries.

 

Lagarde also explained that the loss was incurred as a result of the “matching” of power purchase and sales.

 

He illustrated that if a consumer buys electricity at P4.50 per kilowatt hour for the month of January – the actual consumption period of which is computed from December 26 to January 25 – the consumer is billed on February during which the price of electricity could have changed.

 

Because Ceneco also buys from the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market or WESM, power prices go up or down resulting to differences from month to month, he added.

 

This is why the price of electricity could have become, for example, P5 per kilowatt hour during February yet the consumer is only billed P5 4.50 per kilowatthour, Lagarde said.

 

Cabanilla, however, said that consumers should not “pay for inefficiency” since the Ceneco management is the one responsible for making sure that its billing system should be upgraded.

 

She also said that Ceneco did not collapse since 2004 even though it has not collected its supposed losses.

 

“There are many factors to consider in the failure of electric cooperatives – corruption, inefficiency, mismanagement; it is not only the under or over recoveries that we are talking about,” she added.

 

Aside from that, Cabanilla described the NEA classification system as “lulling people into a false sense of security” because they think that their cooperative is good if it is rated high when it fact it is not.

 

For example, it is the perks of officials and the benefits of employees that are actually affected by the change in classification yet this does not result to additional or improved services for consumers, she added.

 

Asked if it was fair to charge consumers over something that they cannot control, Lagarde said Ceneco is also opposed to the ERC template but they have no choice but to implement it.

 

Bayan Muna Cong. Neri Colmenares noted that the system loss of Ceneco has increased from P10 million in 2010 to P50 million in 2011, an indication with the cooperative’s efficiency.

 

“If Ceneco is efficient, the system loss should have gone down through the years,” he added.

SHADOWS FROM A PROTEST. Image taken during the commemoration of International Labor Day last year in Bacolod City, Philippines | Photo by Julius D. Mariveles

As the world commemorates International Labor Day, the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines salutes and extends solidarity to the workers, particularly to the men and women who toil in our independent press.

Indeed, while physical attacks and other attempts to suppress press freedom continue to be a major concern of Filipino media workers, there are other threats they have to contend with on a daily basis.

It is one of the greatest ironies that many Filipino journalists who write about the plight of our workers are themselves victims of the same exploitative system that keeps the toiling masses from enjoying the real fruits of their labor.

Most media workers work for substandard compensation, at times in locations and situations that often expose them to harm. Many are required to solicit ads to earn commissions in lieu of wages and often forced to accept additional sidelines to augment their take home pay. 
Many others are deprived of the right to security of tenure.

And we do not talk only of the correspondents and stringers but also many of those who work for some of the largest media outfits, where contractualization – and yes, even outsourcing – is fast becoming the norm.

In many more outfits, many of those who do enjoy regular employment are prevented from organizing unions or even associations to protect and advance their rights and welfare.

And because media are, first and foremost, an industry for which profit is the primordial objective, we can expect conditions for workers in media to mirror the same worsening exploitation and oppression of workers in other sectors as employers continue to find ways to keep their costs down to squeeze maximum earnings for themselves.

Just as people demand – and rightly so – the highest ethical standards from us, we, too, should demand ethical ownership.

We, therefore, also challenge media owners to be ethical employers and look to the safety and the welfare of their workers.

But more than this, we workers in media should band together, as we have and continue to stand united against the continued assaults on our ranks, and struggle for better working conditions and just wages. 

May 1, 2012
NUJP NATIONAL DIRECTORATE:
NESTOR BURGOS JR., Chair
JOSEPH ALWYN ALBURO,Vice Chair
ROWENA CARRANZA PARAAN, Secretary-General
MARLON RAMOS, Deputy Secretary-Genera
VERONICA UY, Treasurer
ILANG-ILANG QUIJANO, Auditor
JULIE ALIPALA
JOSE JAIME ESPINA
FEDERICO FERNANDEZ
CHERRYL FIEL
MELVIN GASCON
BOBBY LABALAN
MALU MANAR
RYAN ROSAURO
JEFFREY TUPAS

SINGAPORE – I come from the Philippines, a country where poor people measure contentment three times a day – during breakfast, lunch and dinner – and not in terms of kilobytes and megabytes or the intermittence of Internet signals but in the kilos of rice and the intermittence of salt as a viand on their tables.

While some usually have three social media accounts – Facebook, YouTube and Twitter – many people can only have lunch without breakfast and dinner or just have one of the three every other day.

I come from a country where some people have iPhones, iPads and MacBooks yet students in the rural areas have no pencils, books or notepads. While iPhone users can choose a different cover for their phones every day, primary school students in far-flung areas in my nation have classrooms that are not covered by walls.

We have 29 percent Internet penetration, or 29 million out of 104 million Filipinos get to stream their videos and other social media stuff, yet over 25 million don’t have access to toilet facilities while another 13 million don’t have water streaming out of their faucets because they don’t have faucets in the first place.

While programming communities are fawning over open source software that are least vulnerable to viruses and Trojans, many Filipinos still get their potable water from open sources like creeks and deep wells that are not the safest of sources, laced as it is with communities of bacteria and viruses.

In the Information Age where information flows freely, making it harder to filter the trivial from the essential (like who wants to know if Britney Spears does not use underwear or the philosophy behind bulimia or why some super models puke after eating) only 20 percent of an estimated 25 million students get to finish college in the Philippines.

That is because the integration between the schools levels are not seamless like in the digital world and students cannot flow freely from level to level. Education has become a privilege not a right in my country what with the constantly rising cost of tuition every year.

In advanced nations like here, people hop on fast trains and buses, still connected to the World Wide Web even when travelling via their smart phones. They are always wired but if they are connected to the web of humanity out there, that I have yet to know.

In underdeveloped ones like mine, people still hop on the backs of water buffalos or on a tricycle – that is a motorcycle with a sidecar on that can transport up to 20 people at a time.

They can also ride the habal-habal or Sky Lab (depending on which place you are), a modified motorcycle that would puzzle the Japanese and Chinese who built the contraptions for three but, with a little Pinoy modification, can now seat up to a dozen people and transport them a little closer to home through rough and rugged terrain.

And while urban dwellers don’t want the “barriotic” life of a peasant or the seemingly hopeless condition of an urban poor, they enjoy playing Farm Ville and SimCity even as landlessness remain prevalent.

Farmers remain without land of their own, still tied to the legacy of Middle Ages in Europe during which fiefdoms emerged. Meanwhile, the “squatters,” now euphemistically called the “informal settlers,” are on the fringes of urban centers, waiting for development to come. If it would come.

In the “digital age” the struggle is for bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, connectivity, seamless integration, applications for tablets and gadgets as if hunger and poverty have long been eradicated and the marginalized is defined as one who cannot connect to the World Wide Web and, therefore, cannot continue playing Mob Wars, Mafia Wars or DotA.

“Looking around Asia, there seem to be two types of countries. The ones that play cricket and the ones that eat them,” notes respected journalist Kunda Dixit when he spoke here during the Conference on Reporting on People Power from April 19 to 20 held at the Trader’s Hotel.

For two days, journalists and academics from countries around Asia weighed in on the social media and the role of journalists post the “revolutions” that took place or in the face of continuing struggles in countries like Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Egypt and Tunisia, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

“Betrayal is the most powerful emotion out there and that feeling exists with people who were betrayed by their media,” Richard Gizbert said when he keynoted the affair.

Gizbert, who hosts “Listening Post” over Al Jazeera, a program that discusses developments in the media and how it has performed, said people “feel betrayed by corporate and state media” and have resorted to the social media to get the information they want.

But how powerful is the social media? Is it easier now to spark “revolutions” that can be led from the desktop or from the tablet compared to the time when the world was “Twiterless” and “Facebook-less?”

Take the case of the Philippines, the first country to have people power in the world at a time when there was no Internet. The ones who were doing the actual education and organizing work were political activists who have to go from house to house and lead “DGs” or discussion groups with everyone who wanted to listen about why people should care during the more than 20-year dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos.

Their “tweets” were spread by word of mouth and they faced, not “Facebooked,” farmers, peasants, urban poor, the middle-class, professionals and even sections of the elite who wanted an end to the dictatorship.

As Dixit puts it: “Social movements have been happening even before social media.”

“It is a good way to agitate but not a good mechanism to run a revolution because there is no security,” Dr. Fahed al-Sumait, a research fellow at the National University of Singapore, said about the social media.

Indeed, the social media are “important game-changing tools” that can initially help set in place “leaderless revolution” but cannot put in place a “social compact” that would set the reform agenda for a particular country, Al-Sumait added.

But what should journalists, be it in the social media or the traditional media, report about in the first place?

“New media may not be up to the job yet,” former Newsweek International executive editor Ron Javers, said as he pointed out that some who use the tool are “fact-starved opinion makers.”

And it is not only content that would matter, Javers said, as he paraphrased the famous quote of communication theorist Marshall McLuhan: “In this evolving media universe with thousands of voices, content will be critical but credibility will be king.”

SINGAPORE—Life is fast in this city-state of tree-lined roads, manmade hills, lakes and forests, bright neon lights, and giant outdoor television screens and signs.

Dubbed as Asia’s financial capital, the central bank of the East, the global elite have their enclaves on Sentosa Island, where a seaside property can cost upwards of SG$10 million. Here, the uber rich can stash their gold in or trade at the Singapore Free Port sans tax; while buying a pack of cigarettes can cost you a day’s salary.

You can blend with the crowd and eat affordable and delicious full meals at the hawkers’ centers or you can wait for months to have a degustation in a fancy and expensive restaurant at the Marina Bay Sands, and even see and greet celebrity chefs Wolfgang Puck, Tetsuya Wakuda or Mario Batali.

Again, depending on the wallet, you can shop ‘til you drop at signature boutiques along Orchard Road or hunt for cheap buys at Chinatown or the Thieves’ Market, a popular flea market, on Sungei Road.

A place of intellectual and cultural ferment, international plays, light shows, concerts by the bay and research conferences all happen simultaneously in its many venues, including Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall and the famous Esplanade.

You can reach work here by train, airplane, bus or taxicab. Like in the song, they don’t care how you get there, just get there as fast you can. Meanwhile, the Lamborghinis, Porsches, Lotuses and Ferraris zip past the taxis in the city streets.

This is the place of iPads, iPhones, Galaxy Tabs, Wi-Fi and almost eternal connectivity. Whether on the bus or the MRT, most people are hooked to their fancy gadgets amid the maddening rush, claiming a little spot for themselves and with themselves, until the next bus or train stop and the race continues.

This is also the land where the old and the new meet. Where soaring buildings lord over quaint houses with shutter windows in Chinatown and where the last remaining kampung —Malay village—in Pulau Ubin is just across one of the world’s most modern airports in Changi.

Singapore is one of the Four Tiger Economies of Asia and was ranked last year by the consultancy firm Mercer as the eighth most expensive city in the world, up three spots from its rank in 2010.

It is also in its hawkers’ centers where I have seen elderly people working, mostly cleaning or waiting on the tables. Some of the old people (mostly aged between 65 to 70 years old) I’ve managed to strike a chat with say that they have to work because they still want to. Some say they need the money what with the lack of pension and the inability of their children to support them. While they have a Central Provident Fund, some of the elderly said it is not enough to cover for what they need in old age.

“In hot-paced Singapore, where welfarism is a dirty word, the lowly-skilled aged could head for tougher times,” wrote journalist Seah Chiang Nee in an article that was published in The Star newspaper in March 2007.

The blogger who sports the handle “Lucky Tan” said in “The Diary of a Singaporean Mind” that during the last elections, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew saw an 80-year-old woman still working hard and “his response was one of delight that old folks here are working.”

But at the heart of the issue, “Lucky Tan” said, is: “… if the elderly who have to clean toilets for a living die without seeing benefits of the wealth our society has generated, who benefits from this wealth?”

Even Seah Chiang Nee admits that for the elderly to opt for work “past 62 years of age is not surprising and, in fact, could be a plus point; after all, Singapore’s life expectancy is 81.7 years, the world’s third highest, even ahead of Japan (81.25 years).”

He adds that, “what is not savvy about it is they are doing the sort of menial work once done by unskilled foreign workers. Some 35.7% are cleaners or related work, where incomes are low.”

“It’s not that the elderly don’t want to retire, many simply cannot afford to,” another Singaporean, Rick Lim, was quoted by “Lucky Tan.”

Life is fast in Singapore and it does not slow down even in old age.

This article also appeared on www.interaksyon.com.

I HAVEN'T EVEN STARTED TO THINK ABOUT IT, he said. A newspaper article describes him as a "civil service high-flier (who) may enter politics" | Photo by Julius D. Mariveles

But who exactly is Ong Ye Kung? Here he is in his own words doing a campaign video for the PAP in the last elections.

He was reported last year to be quitting the service, a move that is viewed as a preparation for his eventual entry into politics

The London-educated Ong ran but lost in the 2011 elections as a representative for the Aljuneid Group Representation Constituency (http://goo.gl/qgxvR). The guy can also sing as shown here in a video. (Great access granted to journalists here during elections. They can  take videos of candidates tucking their children in at night and singing to their wives in bed.)

Back to serious matters, Ong was appointed by the SMRT last year to head an internal investigation on the disruption of train services in Singapore.

It goes without saying, however, that Ong will also be facing other contenders for the top post before he becomes Singapore's fourth prime minister. Click link for the list of the two previous and current minister http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Minister_of_Singapore.

The other leading contenders thus far are Heng Swee Keat (who we might interview soon) and two top Army men according to this report: Chan Chun Sing and Tan Chuan Jin.

"High-flier Ong Ye Kung, 42, assistant secretary-general of NTUC, who was introduced as a new candidate yesterday, is among those widely tipped to be a Cabinet heavyweight if elected" http://goo.gl/KofNJ. Although apparently, Ong did not make it to the parliament in last year's elections. Big question though if he will still be a heavyweight should there be a special election this year.

For more photos of the interview of the fellows of Asia Journalism Fellowship with Mr. Ong, check my Flickr page http://goo.gl/bKar5.

NEXT ON THE BLOG: ONG YE KUNG on the brand of unionism of NTUC. Why are old people still working in Singapore? How can the success of the labor movement be measured? What exactly is the "symbiotic relationship" between the PAP and the NTUC? Tomorrow on the blog.