That Cabinet ‘revamp’

Finally, P-Noy is bringing Rene Almendras to the Palace. The President needed to do this a long time ago. P-Noy needed someone by his side with the ability to understand policy options and have the gravitas to speak to other cabinet members and they would understand he speaks for P-Noy. Rene has been spending too much time at the Palace anyway he might as well have a desk there too.

From the start, it was clear P-Noy needed a chief of staff. His executive secretary is more of a lawyer whose ability to fix things behind the scenes with politicians appears to be the bedrock of his usefulness to P-Noy. But speak for P-Noy? Probably not.

Mar Roxas was supposed to be the man the chief of staff position was tailored for. But I had this crazy idea that he would be better off at DOTC, away from the palace intrigues and with the opportunity to show his ability to deliver big ticket projects. That should have toughened his claim to be P-Noy’s successor in 2016. Unfortunately, Mar bombed out at DOTC and who knows how he will do at DILG.

So it seems Rene Almendras is probably going to prove a better pick for the job than Mar. Rene didn’t inherit great wealth so he went up in this world through sheer merit and knows how not to wilt in a competitive environment. And Rene’s ties with P-Noy go back to school days in Ateneo.

Maybe Rene got a bum assignment at energy. The quality of energy secretaries has gone down through the years. After Erap’s Mario Tiaoqui, I got the impression that the energy portfolio wasn’t important enough to merit a secretary who actually knew what he was doing. It was easy for Rene to outperform.

I didn’t know Rene when he assumed the position beyond his being the one running Manila Water. But he impressed me as having done his homework and understood his challenges after I attended one of his early presentations.

Actually, being energy secretary is the most thankless job in the Cabinet. The job carries a great responsibility but little or no authority. The energy secretary gets blamed for rising oil prices, as if there is anything he can do about it. He doesn’t negotiate oil supplies, doesn’t have a fleet of tankers and doesn’t control a refinery and an oil distribution company the way the first energy secretary did.

As for his responsibility to assure reasonably priced electricity and prevent brownouts, in all honesty there is little he can do. It wasn’t like in the past when the energy secretary can get Napocor to build power plants in time to prevent supply shortages. Under Epira, the energy secretary can only wait and hope to convince the private sector to make those needed investments.

I am sure the job proved frustrating for Rene. He got all the brickbats specially in Mindanao, for a problem he doesn’t have all the power to respond to. And in the case of Mindanao, the local politicians had been at the root of much of the problem even years before the first Aquino administration. Hopefully, the new energy secretary who has more political experience than Rene will do better.

It will now be the job of Rene to make sure P-Noy is able to make better and faster decisions and avoid the mistakes we now attribute to the student council amateurs around him. Policy issues will likely be better addressed and P-Noy given a wider range of options from which to choose.

Something like how to manage our relations with China should now start looking like it is being more thoroughly vetted than it was in the recent past. Rene is likely to make sure that P-Noy gets to hear a wider range of views than what he had been getting so far.

Rene will also have to make sure other Cabinet members, specially those entrusted with the execution of infrastructure projects, are able to meet deadlines. Rene will have to closely monitor sticky problems like NAIA and CAAP whose air navigation facilities conked out again last Wednesday forcing at least a dozen planes to land in Clark waiting for NAIA to open again.

But Rene can’t do anything about the Palace lawyers. P-Noy needs to strengthen his legal staff. The Palace needs the kind of lawyers who can dwell in more sophisticated legal theory the way a Tony Carpio or a Nonong Cruz could. Unless P-Noy improves the quality of his legal representation, he may just keep on losing cases in the Supreme Court. That will adversely affect project roll outs.

Overall, it is good to see that P-Noy seems to have gotten more decisive and confident about some of his policy decisions. Soon, perhaps after the 2013 election, a more extensive cabinet revamp is called for. Three years should be more than enough time to know who in his official family performed and who should be changed.

Now that Rene Almendras is officially responsible for helping P-Noy at the Palace I am more confident about the administration’s performance. Rene will make sure proper staff work has been done before anything gets to P-Noy. Rene must make sure the days of the less than competent Student Council are over.

From now on, I hope those of us rooting for P-Noy to succeed shouldn’t have to grimace as we have in the past when an avoidable fumble happens. I am sure, that’s not too much to ask.

Malampaya oil

Speaking of energy, one of the first things the new energy secretary must act quickly upon is the potential oil reserves in Malampaya. In addition to the gas reserves being developed by a consortium composed of Shell, Chevron and PNOC EC, there is also proven oil reserve that is too small for the big oil companies to bother with but still means something to a country like ours.

Eduardo V. Mañalac, an internationally acknowledged expert in offshore oil development who used to head PNOC EC, told Interaksyon that the oil resources beneath the Malampaya natural gas field or the Camago-Malampaya Oil Leg is the largest proven oil deposit in the country to date but remains undeveloped.

I am familiar with that project and have written about it in the past. I know Mañalac tried to develop that reserve during his watch at PNOC EC. He held an international tender for a “farm in” agreement and awarded it but was over ruled by Ate Glue. The former president wanted that awarded to a crony instead who had no track record in petroleum development. (See “Why Ed Mañalac Resigned from PNOC” Demand and Supply, The Philippine Star, March 12, 2008).

Of course Ed resigned after that, as he was unwilling to risk his international reputation on such a raw deal. The international oil company that won the tender conducted by Ed spent over a million dollars for various technical requirements in pursuance of its proposal. It has spent over 16 months and thousands of man hours studying Camago-Malampaya and establishing a development plan to safely extract the oil at the earliest time.

Ed is known to have discovered China’s largest offshore oil field when he was working for Philips Petroleum. When I last talked to Ed a few months ago, he was doing consultancy work in the Middle East and elsewhere where his skills are appreciated.

The development of Malampaya’s oil reserves stalled for the past six years. The Camago Malampaya Oil Leg (CMOL) is estimated to hold between 25 million and 40 million barrels of proven oil reserves.

At current oil prices of roughly $100 per barrel alone, the country would have generated $2.5 billion in gross proceeds from the conservative end of CMOL’s projected reserves. The former PNOC official said that unless CMOL is developed soon, it could become “uneconomical.”

The Department of Energy recently cancelled its service contract with Ate Glue’s crony for failure to develop the project. “We cancelled because for the past six years we have not seen any development,” undersecretary Jose M. Layug, Jr. told Interaksyon.

The next move is with PNOC EC’s.

Doctors

This one is from Ruth Marbibi.

You know, doctors can be so frustrating. You wait a month and a half for an appointment, then he says, “I wish you had come to me sooner.”

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco