The joint venture between Central Negros Electric Cooperative and Primelectric Holdings Corporation is an urgent solution to urgent problems caused by the inefficiency of CENECO, our power distributor in Bacolod City and in five other areas covered by its franchise over four cities and two other towns.
It is interesting to take note that the cities covered by CENECO could very well form a Metro Bacolod area from Silay to Talisay cities in the near north to Bago City in the near south.
The decision to favor or oppose the joint venture agreement is now left to the CENECO consumers to decide through a plebiscite that has now been put on hold as the cooperative’s masterlist of voters has yet to be purged.
At such a historic juncture, those who oppose or favor the JVA must neither tarry nor be coy about their positions.
Now is the time for those who oppose the JVA to lay down in clear and unequivocal terms the reason for their opposition and their practical alternatives to resolve quickly the problems besetting consumers over the recent decades.
Now is the time, too, for those who favor it to break their silence and to be unafraid of the bullying of juveniles.
It must be pointed out that we need now, more than ever clear, practical solutions and not vague, academic ones that can win classroom debates but can never solve real problems in the real world.
What we need are solutions that can be implemented to reduce brownouts to a tolerable minimum, improve customer care services, bring about reasonable power rates, and ensure reliable electricity supply that would be available when needed.
What oppositors, especially those from the Left, have successfully done so far is to offer a spectre (like what Marx has done in his Communist Manifesto), the spectre of unabated power rates they have married to the hip of the joint venture.
The grouplets opposing the JVA are on a Olympic-level competition to present the most expert-sounding argument against the JVA but all harp on several key themes: electricity and the ownership of CENECO as a matter of right.
Many of them are obsessed with the argument that turning CENECO into a “true” cooperative and the looming approval by the National Electrification Administration of its capital expenditure (capex) will bring about solutions for the woes of consumers.
To them, the “people” will become the victims of Big Business and cannot afford to pay their power bills though some of their advocates are bums who have graduated college and still live off the hard work of their parents.
Too, these oppositors could not even understand or explain why the masa they always strive to portray as victims could find the means to buy brandy by longneck bottles and cigarettes by the pack almost every night but would always say they cannot afford to pay their power bills.
The opposition is largely ideological and, as most ideological struggles are, bereft of practical solutions and condemned to the dustbin of tubaans or relegated to the jobless, lazy bum’s idea of intellectual foreplay with the hopes of being laid for the night.
Drastic and quick solutions need capital, huge amounts of it. Enrique Razon has lots of it. Primelectric has lots of it.
Razon’s MORE Power sunk money in Iloilo City when they took over. Services improved. I saw it myself.
To deny Negrosanons under CENECO’s franchise area quick and practical solutions to the problems they have been facing for so long is not only unjust.
It is in essence anti-people and anti-development, a delusional virtue-signalling, juvenile attempt at conjuring a vision of a humane and just society.
What we need are real solutions to real problems so that we, when electricity is assured, can go on with our real lives that is being productive to earn our keep, to feed ourselves and our families.
To labor for ourselves and each other.
Some of the noisy ones don’t have real problems and real lives.
They are busy battling the windmills in their minds.
Except they don’t even know a whit about Don Quixote or Rocinante.
