The Leni-Kiko campaign rally in San Jose, Occidental Mindoro last April 6, 2022, has three important highlights at least from my point of view: it paved the way for Cong. Nene Sato’s declaration of support for the Kakampink tandem, the first-ever dance steps of VP Leni in her entire campaign sortie and it became the venue where my kababayans protested for more than three decades of an intermittent power outage that we are experiencing since January of this year. I will just focus on the last two climaxes for it’s just natural for Cong. Nene to endorse VP Leni for they are both top brasses of the Liberal Party (LP). Let us juxtapose Leni’s fandango and our being the infamous “brownout capital of the Philippines.”
Regardless of our political affiliations, we are gravely affected by this debacle of power interruptions. We are experiencing this hellish situation even since Leni Robredo was still earning her degree in Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of the Philippines Diliman. Even when she was not yet a lawyer and married to Jesse Robredo, energy crises have been bugging my people to no end and Cong. Nene was already a vice-governor just two years later. Cong. Nene has never been defeated since 1988 and has been up and down, in a manner of speaking, as congresswoman and governor interchangeably.
After reading a placard with the message "Mga sanay sa brownout for Leni," VP Leni said, "Pero hindi ba dapat hindi tayo nasasanay because ang kuryente, basic na pangangailangan natin. Ang akin lang pong mapapangako sa inyo, kapag ako mismo and pangulo, ako mismo and tututok sa mga bagay na ito." She assured every one of us and that was after she rendered that historic Hanunuo fandango with all gracefulness and gusto. When she said, "Ako mismo," it was tantamount to saying that since the effort of the local leaders are not enough, if ever elected, the veep herself will take the responsibility of solving it.
The crowd roared for they know that electricity is as essential as lugaw in some situations. Even the nationalistic Day of Valor last Saturday, April 9, became a "Day of Brownout" in a large part of the province. Sad.
The apologists of the local power groups and the propagandists of the congresswoman herself say that she should not be faulted for such a predicament. They insist on blaming Governor Ed Gadiano for such a fiasco saying that it is his role as the province’s chief executive to provide basic needs of his constituency, especially electricity even if he was in the position only for less than three years now.
Aside from lambasting the governor for this over spinning rotational brownout in the province, the political propagandists and critics of the provincial chief executive keep on defending the Occidental Mindoro Electric Cooperative (OMECO) and the Occidental Mindoro Consolidated Power Corporation (OMCPC) saying that though the latter had already been ready in supplying the whole power requirement of the province, the contract has been archived at the Department of Energy (DOE) and Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) unsigned by the authorities concerned. They keep on censuring the supposed red tape in said national offices and Gov. Gadiano for unsubstantiated expositions. I do understand they have the right to say this because of political reasons no matter how silly their arguments are. I do believe that electricity and politics are inseparable (I will write a separate blog entry about this next time).
The rally participants found a venue to once again vent their concerns and our province’s endless tragedy that has been hounding us even during the time of the fictitious Majoma. The million-dollar question is this, how come that after decades and decades of this situation of doom, the concerned sector only managed to provide us with limited power sources and just one producer through the years? They were a failure in this matter and we, the consumers, and the supposed co-owners of the electric cooperative were led to a dark slaughterhouse of uncertainty.
In the past four decades or so, we are given false hopes by our sitting provincial politicians on this nagging issue of power shortage. The mammoth 18 thousand more or less Leni-Kiko crowd both came from opposing political camps, by the way. The only thing common to them is they are all pro-Leni and Kiko but they differ in their local choices for governor, among other positions.
In the 1990s, people look up the Power Sharing Agreement between Island Power Corporation (IPC) and OMECO as the ultimate solution and expected to electrify every municipality but our aspirations gradually died like a fading candle. The reasons for its failure involve financial, managerial, legal, and technical issues surrounding the agreement besides the fact that the later owner of IPC is a local political leader in the province. We more than ever were left figuratively in the dark. We as a people feel betrayed by these nothing but money-paddled transactions. EPI was allegedly a power company that is about to operate a 45-megawatt geothermal power plant in Naujan, Oriental Mindoro but EPI and OMECO including the rest of the national power industry agencies dropped it like a hot potato for reasons that I’m not privy to discuss but what’s important is, we, the people have again faced a broken political promise for a clean and secured, sustained and affordable power supply that purportedly we will be enjoying in 2017. They again lied to us about our aspirations for a brown-out free (or less brownout) Occidental Mindoro puffed like a balloon of colds in a murky kid’s stuffy nostrils.
In just a wink of an eye and away from the eyes of the public, the EPI and the OMCPC changed roles like harlequins in a circus. With dedication and fervor, Cong. Nene has been bridging coordination gaps among energy national regulatory agencies such as the DoE, ERC, NPC, the NEA and OMECO, and OMCPC, sole distributor and supplier, respectively. Until now, the light at the end of the tunnel is still a thing of the future. We still grope for true and brand new political leaders whose heart bleeds with us in our darkest moments. We still shout and cry for fast-tracking the Competitive Selection Process (CSP) and welcoming all the qualified applicants as power providers and pressuring all the involved power industry sectors to act swiftly on the matter.
But this is a thing that political apologists cannot alter: brownouts, as well as politicians, overstays on this forsaken half of the island we call home. And the people are fed-up with both!
This is their eternal legacy of Pandanggo sa Dilim, similar to Remigio Agpalo’s political analogy/analysis Pandanggo sa Ilaw, a folk dance that originated here in our province, particularly in Lubang Island, in 1965.
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My upcoming entry: "The Inseparability of Politics and Electricity: A Reflection Paper"
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Photo: Sen. Kiko Pangilinan’s Twitter account
Reference:
https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1482004/mindorenos-assured-of-sufficient-power-supply-sato
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