| DIE HARD III |
 |
| Herman Tiu Laurel |
04/20/2012
The final insult to our Mindanaoan brothers and sisters who have
politely raised their appeal the past few months to the national
political authorities for action on the Mindanao power crisis came via
the cancellation of the April 19, 2012 meet by the Joint Congressional
Power Commission (JCPC), the body tasked to oversee the implementation
of the power privatization law known as the Electric Power Industry
Reform Act (Epira).
The cancellation, according to its chairman,
Sen. Serge Osmeña, was due to the absence of his co-chairman, Rep.
Henedina Abad, as well as those of other members who could not confirm
their attendance. Given these characters’ track record, the past 10
years of sitting on urgent issues in their respective energy committees,
“postponement” is likely a deliberate delay in furtherance of their
covert pressure tactics.
While Osmeña takes his easy time, the
JCPC is keeping roughly 30 million Mindanaoans waiting in darkness. This
is clearly the reason for some Mindanaoans to now take matters into
their own hands.
Early Wednesday morning we got an urgent call
from veteran political warrior Homobono Adaza. In the midst of handling
countless legal cases, from the power plunder and the Corona impeachment
to several political-legal-economic issues in tandem with lawyer Alan
Paguia, Adaza has decided to spring into action in response to the
blatant imperialism of Manila’s elite politicians against the people of
Mindanao.
The power summit in Davao where approximately a thousand
people from all over Mindanao attended, hoping to have a dialog with BS
Aquino III, instead became a forum where they were treated to an
imperial dressing down and ordered to “pay up or face blackouts,” and
told further to accept the privatization of Mindanao’s “crown jewel,”
the Agus-Pulangi hydroelectric system.
Then, as if to rub salt on
an open wound, Mindanaoans were made to expect some dialog later in the
JCPC, only to be so rudely cancelled until the next whim of the man who
calls them “spoiled” brats.
Apparently, the evening before, Adaza
was already in consultation with numerous Mindanao citizens and
political leaders where a consensus was reached that Mindanao should
organize again — as it did during the long Marcos period — a political
party of its own to redress the grievous shortchanging it has been
getting from Manila’s “elite imperialists.” Adaza certainly has had
experience on this as he was one of the major organizers of the
victorious Mindanao Alliance in the 1970s that catapulted him, Reuben
Canoy, and Nene Pimentel to national prominence.
Adaza’s brief on
Mindanao’s current predicament reads like an oft-repeated wish list:
First, Mindanao has not had sufficient representation in the seat of
national political policy, the Senate; second, the Epira issue needs
strong Mindanao representation that will not only “appeal” but take
decisive political action to repair the damage that has been done;
third, as a counter-measure, Mindanao should win a fair share of the
Senate seats, at least four of 12, up for grabs in 2013.
The call
of Adaza for the “Mindanao Action Party” (MAP) will ring loud and clear
to all Mindanaoans; thus, Luzon and the Visayas must support this for
their own sake.
We have seen the fighting spirit of our Mindanao
brothers, unspoiled by Manila’s politics and pampering which the
regional and provincial politicians in the political center have fallen
for. Though we don’t know yet if Adaza himself will be a MAP candidate,
we hope that more like him from Mindanao will pick up the mantle of
being the people’s champion in the coming senatorial elections to show
these corrupted national leaders what it means to fight for the people’s
cause.
The fundamental strategy I surmise is to consolidate
Mindanao’s votes which would be around 11 million today, enough to put
MAP’s candidates into the last four slots of the Senate. In 2010, the
12th, and tail-ender TG Guingona, who now sits as a Lopez backstop next
to Osmeña, got 9.6 million votes. Mindanao’s fight now is a
national fight, which Mindanao has actually carried on where Luzon and
the Visayas found themselves exhausted after 10 years of protesting the
Epira. Mindanao is also the final frontier for the foreign and local
power oligarchs to subdue, just as it was when the Spaniards and
Americans tried to pacify the whole country for their colonial
domination but were stopped in Mindanao.
The power oligarchs,
through the mouth of Serge Osmeña, are saying they want to raise the
power rates in Mindanao to the level of Cagayan de Oro of P7.50 per
kilowatt-hour (kWh) at this time, which is $0.18 per kWh and higher than
even Hong Kong’s $0.14 per kWh. Even if that rate were lower than
Manila’s or the national average of $0.23 per kWh today, the aim of the
oligarchs is to eventually even all this out to the Manila and national
average. These have all been stated in so many words by Energy Secretary
Rene Almendras and Serge Osmeña; and with the lopsided Performance
Based Regulation (PBR) scheme, rates will definitely go up every three
years.
The Mindanao and national struggle to restore truthful,
just, and fair electricity rates in generation, transmission, and
distribution, as well as the sector’s ownership structure and laws,
epitomize everything that has gone wrong with the country under the
present “plutonomy,” an economy controlled by plutocrats who also
control the present crop of political players ushered in by Edsa I and
II’s Yellow mobs. It’s time for a national political “jihad,” a holy war
of the people, against these plutocrats and corrupt politicians.
(Tune
in to 1098AM, dwAD, Sulo ng Pilipino/Radyo OpinYon, Monday to Friday, 5
to 6 p.m.; watch Destiny Cable GNN’s HTL edition of Talk News TV,
Saturdays, 8:15 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11:15 p.m., on “Electricity
and fuel price crisis: Solutions” with consumer advocate Dr. Amanda Cruz
and Wilson Fortaleza of FDC; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com
for our articles plus TV and radio archives)
(Reprinted with permission from Mr. Herman Tiu-Laurel)
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL:
http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20120420com7.html
