SONA or later

La Presidenta’s reappointment of Virgilio Garcillano and Emmanuel Barcelona to the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) in spite of the controversies and suspicions that dogged them during and after the May 10 elections is not a good augury that her forthcoming appointments or "changes" (i.e. rigodon) in the Cabinet will be better.

Sadly, the re-elected GMA is beginning to look less than a new GMA, and more like a more stubborn and this time "I-don’t-care-what-you- think" kind of GMA.

What the Chief Executive could have quietly done, since the appointment of the two commissioners had lapsed, was simply not reappoint them. If there’s any agency in the government that desperately needs fixing, it’s the Comelec. Unless that vital election body is purged, reformed, and rendered both fool-proof honest and efficient, then our people will lose faith in this politically insane asylum we call "democracy".

Everyone knows that the last election was badly flawed. Many of our people, it’s evident, believe there was a lot of cheating. Whether this cheating would have affected the outcome of the Presidential contest enough to have deprived KNP Opposition challenger Fernando Poe Jr. of victory is still unclear in the minds of some, perhaps even many of our citizens.

GMA has won. From the beginning, she had the equity of the incumbent and the advantage of controlling all the levers of government. Judging from the sloppy way in which the FPJ campaign was conducted (which blew an earlier 20 percent advantage away), the tireless, relentless GMA would probably have won without any chicanery or fraud in key areas. Yet she must remember that her margin of victory was slim.

In this light, now that she is embarked on her own confirmed six-year term – no longer required to wheel and deal for the next election – it is the judgment of posterity and of history of which she must beware.

Inexplicably then, why is she still acting like a politician, paying off perceived political "debts", spouting populist rhetoric, pitting (as her amazingly disjointed Inaugural speech) the poor against the rich?

La Presidenta speaks of providing ten million new jobs during her term, but then scares away (by her rhetoric) the investors who would provide the capital to underwrite those jobs. Will La Emperadora create those jobs, voilá! with a wave of her magic wand?

Abraham Lincoln, a poor boy who fought his way up to the White House from poverty in Illinois (from log cabin to President, as they used to say in Peoria), once wisely declared that "you do not uplift the poor by impoverishing the rich." Indeed, the poor need the rich – and the investors with cash and confidence, if they are to get the opportunity to work.

One of the reasons we’re now on the brink of bankruptcy, our fiscal deficit horrendous, is the fact that Ate Glo, or Gloria Labandera, when she took over the Presidency, tried to out-Erap her deposed predecessor, Erap para sa Mahirap. EDSA Dos and the desertion of his generals had overturned Erap’s jeepney, so Ate Glo tried to grab the "tricycle" as the symbol of her regime, an even more outmoded type of transportation. She set out to dispense more goodies to the poor in order to seduce the Erap masa – who had stormed the gates of the Palace on May Day – to her side. Now, it seems she is trying to do FPJ one better.

Madam President, you must now be President, not a panderer or a cheap, huckstering politician. And this is the very moment to hit the ground running – in the right direction. By your next moves and appointments, you will tell us what is your vision of a true State of the Nation.

* * *

The 13th Congress will convene on July 26, a Monday. It will elect its Speaker and Senate President – then, President Macapagal-Arroyo will deliver her State of the Nation Address (SONA) before the joint Houses. And, over television and radio, to our eagerly-listening people.

We already know, of course, the State of the Government. It’s in shambles. It’s up to the "new" Gloria to repair it – and get it going again. (And I don’t mean at the slowpoke, primitive pace of the tricycle.)

I hope, in the meantime, that our Congressmen and Senators, put as their priority not political squabbling and recrimination (the wounds of the recent political fight are still raw, bitter and festering) but the urgent need to address our awful deficit, get any necessary revenue measures adopted, restore confidence in our economy, assure power generation and electricity, and, in short, attend to the nitty-gritty. What I fear is that the legislature may get sidetracked into too much debate over "Cha-cha", the proposed switch to a parliamentary system, etc. First things first. And what must come first is survival.

Would you believe? For all its woes and terrorist fears in the wake of the Bali bombings and the rampage of Jemaah Islamiya and other Islamic fanatical movements, Indonesia is still considered a more desirable destination for foreign investors than our sunny Philippines.

What’s interesting, though, is that the Indonesian election "count" has been faster than ours – indeed, with 7.4 million votes (5.7 percent of the expected total) counted Monday night, it already appears that the perceived front-runner, former Security Minister Susilo "Bambang" Yudhoyono may not secure the "over 50 percent" vote needed for outright victory, and there will have to be a run-off poll, or second round of voting next September 20.

This is because the incumbent President Megawati Sukarnoputri, who’s expected to lose in the end – owing to poor performance, poor visibility, and her all-too-visible husband – has been making a surprisingly strong showing.

If there’s a run-off election, as already seems likely, this will mean another 10 weeks of campaigning. Oh, well, in Asia our democracies are not perfect. But neither, if you look more closely, are some in Europe. This is consuelo de bobo, of course.

* * *

I’m glad that Energy Secretary Vincent Perez – and even two former Energy ministers, Lito Camacho and Francisco Viray, have gone public to assert that power rates must inevitably rise before they can fall. Paradoxical but true.

What this writer has been saying all along is that the low rates of NAPOCOR (the National Power Corp.) were ruinous, and this obvious "subsidy" of politically-motivated low rates had plunged our government into horrible levels of debt.

How can, as President GMA has directed, the Department of Energy sell NAPOCOR to private buyers when any purchaser will insist on procuring NAPOCOR’s assets without assuming any of NAPOCOR’s debts?

Over the last decade, NAPOCOR has been earning an absurdly low or negative return on its assets with their latest being a negative 1.7 percent. The P2.00/kilowatt hour (kwh) increase needed by the state-owned firm will just barely get them to an 8 percent return required by international creditors to keep their heads above water and avoid being in technical default of their loans. The only reason NAPOCOR has survived with such a low return is that the government has been either guaranteeing its loans or borrowing on its behalf.

The resulting P4.56/kwh it needs as selling price in Luzon in a rate higher than any private-sector IPP (independent power producers) in the country! This despite the special tax breaks and concessions government-owned NAPOCOR has over its private sector counterparts. Alas we see the folly of relying on government to provide our basic services. Not only is government notoriously inefficient but the illusion of cheap power rates must be funded from taxpayers’ pockets! Doing so in turn has severely depleted funding for other basic services like health and education for the poor as well as better roads and bridges needed for economic progress. And so the downward spiral of underdevelopment continues.

The new NAPOCOR rate petition, ironically, offers us a ray of hope. Finally, we see some signs that government is on track towards doing what’s necessary but unpopular. It’s probably from latent recognition that the country is finally at the end of its rope and we no longer have any viable options. The numbers don’t lie and, more than anything, they confirm that, to break out of this vicious cycle, we no longer have any choice but to privatize the notoriously inefficient NAPOCOR and get government out of the power sector.

If there’s a lesson from all this, it’s that politicians cannot and will never raise power rates even if it destroys the power industry. They consider it political suicide to do so and it wins them votes when they suppress rates. So the hot potato simply gets passed on from one administration to the next until one unfortunate administration finds its back against the wall (exactly where we are today) with no recourse but to do the unpopular.

Summing up: Let’s face it. We have a power crisis on our hands. Energy Minister Perez cannot be faulted for trying to sound optimistic, claiming that we’re on our way to tapping more "power" from geothermal and even wind-sources, etc. At the end of the day, we’ll still face the prospect of terrible rolling brown-outs in year 2007, even more stultifying than the ones which plagued us in the last year of the Cory Administration, unless we get cracking immediately to build more power plants – as well as saving NAPOCOR by getting it sold to private sector buyers.

These cannot be accomplished unless government bites the bullet (my favorite phrase nowadays) and acquires the political will to stop subsidizing artificially low rates. We’ve reached the pathetic stage in which we’re attempting to borrow more money abroad just to keep up our payments on the interest of the loans we’ve already incurred abroad. Reminds me of the poignant line in the song, Ol’ Man River, which goes: Another day older and deeper in debt.

How do we get out of the hole? Sorry, I can’t provide the answer. I’m no magician. But for all our penchant for self-flagellation and self-denigration, we are a people endowed with remarkable talent, courage, fortitude and chutzpah, if we only stopped squabbling, engaging in political fun and games, and, recapturing that old patriotism and simple faith, joined hands in moving ourselves forward again. Sounds utopian and, well, silly doesn’t it? Yet "People Power" – the only real one at the EDSA barricades in 1986 – gave us a glimpse of what we could become. The whole world thrilled at this upsurge of national spirit. Then it fizzled out. We disappointed the world. What’s more tragic is that we disappointed ourselves.

We must try again. What we need really is people pawis – a great deal of sweat, generosity towards each other, and faith.