As Congress reconvenes

Hundreds March to Batasan vs. Emergency Powers and the pork-riddled 2015 Budget

By SANLAKAS and BMP
October 20, 2014

QUEZON CITY – Hundreds of urban poor, workers and farmers marched into Batasan as Congress reconvened Monday, October 20. Members of SANLAKAS, Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP), Partido Lakas ng Masa (PLM), Kongreso ng Pagkakaisa ng Maralitang Lungsod (KPML) and Aniban ng Manggagawa sa Agrikultura (AMA) rallied in front of Congress to oppose a plan to sign a Joint Resolution Granting Emergency Powers to President Aquino, and the passage of the 2015 Budget, which Congress is set to pass within the next few days before going into recess again on October 30.

President Aquino asked Congress to grant him emergency powers in order to address an anticipated power crisis in 2015, based on Energy Secretary Jericho Petilla’s projections. But debates among government officials continue over whether this power crisis is real or not. Officials have also been divided over solutions to the anticipated shortfall in power by 2015 when Malampaya for its regular maintenance shutdown.

Says Atty. Aaron Pedrosa of SANLAKAS, “the President’s determination of a power shortage by 2015 is one based on conjecture absent of substantiation. What the government intends to do is to rent out power barges and diesel generation sets at an estimated contract price of P14 Billion for a two-year lease. This is a short-sighted approach and does not address the real problems plaguing a deregulated power industry. It diverts the public from the real power crisis that has defined the industry for more than a decade now thanks to EPIRA.”

Gie Relova of BMP elaborated, “To date, 2.7 million households remain without access to electricity; the country’s power rates are the most expensive in Asia and rank fifth in the world; market manipulation and collusion are at its worst with prices being manipulated in the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM), defying a cornerstone promise of EPIRA – of providing affordable and reliable electricity to the people. More than 13 years after EPIRA was passed, a mere five families control the power industry.”

Atty. Pedrosa adds, “Emergency powers will only result in socializing more obligations that the government intends to pursue. To this day, we are paying for the take or pay provisions and sovereign guarantees extended by the Ramos Administration when it was granted emergency powers allowing it to enter into lopsided supply contracts with independent power producers. That burden will be augmented with the proposal to enter into contracts with private firms for the lease of their generation sets. It is the people who will in the end foot the bill.”

“The power crisis is bigger than a mere projected shortfall. It requires a solution that recognizes the failure of a paradigm that puts the burden of providing for our power needs in private hands. Emergency power is not the solution,” Pedrosa concluded.

The groups also decried the passage of the 2015 budget, which they described as “pork-ridden”, and which continues to allow lump-sum, therefore discretionary, appropriations, such as the Presidential Special Purpose Fund. “The Pork Barrel System is alive, and will continue to drain our resources, and deprive the people of funds for such basic needs as housing, education and health,” decried Orly Gallardo of the KPML.

BMP’s Relova raised the alarm with regard the insertion of the provision for the redefinition of “savings”, “ala- DAP that in effect will now allow the President to use or misuse the funds by simply declaring funds as ‘savings’ at any time of the year so long as he declares it ‘justifiable’.”