Mindanao summer’s nightmare

It is a ritual that Mindanao goes through each year. But as an annual procedure, it is anything but ceremonious. No ritual, in fact, can be more excruciating. It is called rotating brownouts.

“Every year or so, government goes through the motions of addressing the same problem,” I wrote in this same space on April 16, 2012 (“Light for Mindanao”). That summer of rotating brownouts, Manila organized what I said then was a much-hyped “Mindanao Power Summit” in Davao City.

Two years of rotating brownouts later, we now know it was just all power tripping.

Two years ago, President Aquino, in one of his typical student council counselings, had said he had only two choices to offer the Mindanao people: Endure the brownouts or be prepared to pay more for electricity.

Two years of rotating brownouts later, we are still faced with more of the same hao shao (haphazard, amateurish) attitude.

Ever the favorite culprit is Mindanao’s 70-percent dependence on hydroelectricity. Government apologists say its two major hydroelectric dams—Lanao’s Agus River and Bukidnon’s Pulangi River—are heavily silted. Our energy sector engineers must be living in the Dark Ages (pun intended). Siltation, even without forest denudation, is a natural process. River floods washing down silt is an age-old phenomenon. It is incredible that siltation mitigation was never made part of the operational package. With our increasing knowledge of government thievery (thanks to the PDAF scandal), we fully know there is money to address siltation. Surely, it won’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out.

But government’s solution to the Pulangi River siltation borders on the bizarre. Because of siltation, a fifth Pulangi River dam “will have to be built”—because existing turbines operate at low capacity due to siltation. A new dam is an enormous civil works project that entails mammoth expense. Where expense is huge, there is thievery. These two are Siamese twins. The new dam, instead of siltation mitigation, is offered as a

“better” solution. Without the latter, however, the comedy shall go on and on; if the new dam gets silted, we will build another one, and another, and another, so on and so forth.

But the comedy will not be entertaining. Consider what is being sacrificed: Sacred Manobo ancestral lands in southern Bukidnon will be inundated by the new dam and by its accompanying water retention lake. Because it will kill indigenous culture and traditions, the project should never be deemed sustainable. Government is supposed to be the guardian not only of environmental sustainability but also of cultural integrity. Sustainability of the environment, in fact, seems to be a principle lost in the mad scramble to build more power plants in Mindanao that will liberate the island from its overdependence on hydro sources.

An intriguing proposition is now going the rounds: This summer’s rotating brownouts in Mindanao are induced, they are one big fakery. So do two civil society advocates—the environmental group Sulog and the good governance group Save CdO Now—suspect. Ralph Vincent Abragan of both groups says that Mindanao’s rotating brownouts are induced to justify the construction of more coal-fired power plants, to condition the consumers’ minds into believing that there is an urgent need for coal-fired power plants. “The power outages are just artificial as a way to manipulate the public’s acceptance of another coal-fired power plant,” Abragan claims. It will be a long drawn-out battle, he says but “[we] will stop even (its) construction.”

Giving credence to Abragan’s suspicion is the fact that a new power player is actually about to venture into the energy industry in Mindanao. FDC Utilities, of the Gotianun conglomerate Filinvest Development Corp., is about to build a coal-fired power plant in Misamis Oriental. (Note that it will be northern Mindanao’s second coal-fired power plant.) Indeed Filinvest’s entry was cloaked in rather suspicious circumstances. Initially, it met stiff opposition from the provincial board of Misamis Oriental, ostensibly for environmental reasons. But lo and behold, all virulent opposition melted a few weeks later. Did money change hands?

A congressional legislator is said to have “facilitated” FDC’s entry. What’s a legislator’s business doing such thing outside of legislation? I hope it’s not counting money. Abragan says that those behind the project—among them, politicians of different political colors—rammed it down the public’s throat despite the established environmental risks posed by a coal-fired power plant, risks long known to Europe. Again we ask: Did money change hands?

If indeed money changed hands, must it take such hooliganism to build a coal-fired power plant? If indeed money changed hands, why do elected officials have to resort to criminal behavior to “serve the public interest”?

What does it take to put elected officials behind bars? Sometimes the answer may lie in an enlightened civil society who can see beyond partisan politics and stay vigilant against lapses in good governance, including lapses made by those they themselves elected into and supported in office.

There is no such thing as electing a “lesser evil.”