S1L3 – Senate Probe of NEA will expose its Derelect Relevance
So there’s going to be a Senate investigation into this worsening anarchy that the National Electrification Administration (NEA) is fomenting in Baguio and Benguet in its hungry grab for BENECO.
When all the chips start falling where they may, NEA may yet realize that standing up for just one woman’s career is not worth the existential crisis it will now face.
NEA is bending backward mysteriously too far to install a former PCOO assistant secretary—that’s the same rank once held by Mocha Uson—as general manager of the Triple-A rated BENECO. The problem is the woman cannot explain power generation, distribution—or even something as simple as power rate computation—if her life depended on it. She’s as unqualified to skipper an industrial electric utility firm as a peasant dancing the ballet.
But NEA’s inordinate obsession to enthrone her at all costs is giving rise to educated theories that she represents only the iceberg tip of a broader coalition of interests casting a moist eye on the lucrative BENECO. That has now, obviously, piqued the curiosity of the Senate. Is this kind of blue-collar banditry what the law created NEA for? Or has NEA outlived its relevance in the post-EPIRA regime?
For too long, the question whether NEA should now be abolished had always been pushed in the backburner. It’s time to confront the issue squarely. NEA is a relic from the missionary era of rural electrification. Back in the postwar years, electrifying far-flung barrios needed heavy capital outlays that no small utility franchise can put up. Commercial bank credit was out of the question because no bank will lend money to a small cooperative with no large subscriber base from which it can generate enough revenue to make loan payments.
Thus, NEA was created to act as conduit for international credit obtained with state guaranty which the government farmed out posthaste to small cooperatives across the archipelago. That enabled the government to extend the reach of rural electrification without enormous outlay of public funds, while making use of distribution infrastructures it did not have to put in place.
Gradually, subscriber numbers grew as did revenues for many of these pintsized utilities. Soon many of them could now afford the cost of missionary electrification using the profits from operation alone.
To be sure, these cooperatives could still use credit—especially convenient when importing operation-required commodities.
But this time, creditors have more confidence in the viability of these cooperatives that many are willing to transact with them directly, bypassing NEA.
Faced by diminishing relevance, NEA has shifted its mindset from serving coops to imposing subservience from them. No longer contented in its role as backseat driver, it now wants to take the wheel.
Arguably, the law says NEA can do that in an intervention context only. When a cooperative is foundering, finding its management skillset overmatched by the daunting complexity of keeping electricity flowing through the grid, NEA can send in astute experts to nurse an ailing cooperative back to health. But what NEA is doing right now is the opposite: sending in people even more clueless, who are doing a terrific job of destroying an erstwhile-unbroken thing. It’s like sending fleas to help a dog stop itching.
If NEA has this much time on its hands, maybe it’s because it has little or no more job to perform. So it wants to morph from credit broker to powerbroker, with a side dish of heartbroker the way it is driving Baguio and Benguet residents up in arms from total disappointment.
They underestimate the intelligence of Baguio and Benguet. They think so long as the political patronage underpinning this powergrab is kept in the lowest decibel levels, people wouldn’t know any better.
But people do know better. Heavily-armed commandos do not swoop down in predawn raids unless the go-signal is given in the Visayan tongue. People know and are itching to exact retribution at the polls.
If Al Cusi doesn’t believe that, just wait for the election results in these parts come May 2022.
The author is a writer and lawyer based in Baguio City, Philippines. Former editor of the Gold Ore and Baguio City Digest, professor of journalism, political science and law at Baguio Colleges Foundation (BCF). He is a photographer and video documentarist. He has a YouTube channel called “Parables and Reason”