GOTCHA By Jarius Bondoc, The Philippine Star, Monday, June 16, 2008
Though long retired as national security adviser, Joe Almonte finds it his duty to warn of dangers facing the land. In late 2002 he popped back to public scene with portentous vision. The poor were getting poorer, leaders were doing nothing, and Filipinos were losing hope. The Republic needed rescue from further decline. Presidential-congressional-local elections were just 18 short months away. Malacañang, Congress and the Comelec must lay down a series of reforms to ensure that votes are counted right. If not, people will all the more be alienated from the system of the political and economic elite. Dire consequences would follow.
Nobody listened. Gloria Arroyo at first begged off from that election but ran all the same with help from Virgilio Garcillano and Jocjoc Bolante. Fighting for the top prize of pork barrels, candidates from both admin and opposition fell back on foul electioneering and dagdag-bawas. Provincial and town kingpins employed violence to retain or gain seats. A useless Comelec allowed all that, even after a Supreme Court rebuke for a sham automation that wasted P1.3 billion. Today’s political strife, killings, hunger and greed as in the NBN-ZTE scam can be traced back to the farcical balloting of 2004.
Elections are again around the corner. Conditions that marked the last national-local voting have worsened. Almonte is back with solutions for those who’d care to act. During the recent launching of his book, To Put Our House in Order, We Must Level the Playing Field, he chatted up past and present government officials on choosing a Malacañang candidate. “Make sure he’s a reformist now, because if not he will never be a reformist when he becomes President,” he brought the issue down to basics. On speaking tours, he painstakingly explains the need for a modernizing national leader to match a growing number of achievers in local levels. “In our country, only the President has that kind of transformative political power,” he told Galing Pook members, among them governors and mayors, last weekend.
Almonte has no illusion of a white knight, though. Raising such an exceptional President is beyond the capability of our present-day politics which, he says, rests on long-established patronage. And so he pounds back on the need for electoral reforms. Cleaning up the voting process will not bring deliverance overnight. But it will encourage new leaders to try their hand in public service, and restore people’s faith in democratic exercises. Even just a handful of legislators and local officials can force some of the major electoral changes, to produce still more reformists.
Almonte adds four other urgent reforms of the political economy:
• Open up the economy and reduce state intervention — both to cut down oligarchic influence and to curb opportunities for rent seeking.
• Professionalize the civil service, by raising salaries into rates competitive with the private sector; installing a meritocracy through service grades set by examinations; and stabilizing tenures by transferring the appointing power for officers from the President to the civil service system.
• Strengthen political parties, the best way for which is to switch from presidential to parliamentary.
• Recapture the nation’s political center from oligarchic control, starting with putting in place a system of public financing for presidential elections.
The improvements Almonte advocates are bite-size, not pipe dreams. Serious political parties would do well to adopt them.
* * *
Are big electricity users ready for open access and retail competition? The organization of electrical engineers doesn’t think so. Sure, managers of factories and power-intensive facilities know their bills will drop if given the choice of electricity distributors. But they still have to take the crucial steps in preparing to buy wisely from electric retailers.
Two years of info drives by the engineers showed that potential beneficiaries of open access have been too slow to do what’s needed. Why, even electric cooperatives that distribute to small locales admit they don’t know how to buy from the existing wholesale electricity spot market. Too, of 494 factories, hospitals and facilities in
Open access requires hiring of electrical engineers adept in plotting the big user’s electricity needs 24/7, then buying electricity futures based on anticipated ebb and peak hours. For this, the users need five engineers for round-the-clock shifts with one day-off per week. First order of the day is to review the user’s electricity consumption for the past year or two, and analyze where to cut power costs through smart buying.
* * *
