Power monopoly is exacting a serious toll on the pockets of ordinary Filipinos. Already suffering from the increasing prices of commodity goods and the skyrocketing oil prices in the open markets, millions of low and medium-income earners are beaten to the pulp just to make both ends meet.
Of course, the blame is always pointed to Meralco as the real culprit why the power consumers are put at the mercy of this Lopez-owned electric company. Through the years, it has learned to dupe millions of consumers and legally extorting billions of money from the people in the guise of puting it in the power bill as part of "system’s losses." The truth is that most of these extra power charges are reflected as Meralco’s way of recovering its billions of losses from the innocent consumers who could only groan in disgrace and frustration.
Isn’t this flagrant robbery of the hard-earned cash of ordinary consumers? If Meralco has still left with it a clear conscience, it would not resort to this kind of extortion delecto from people whose economic budget is already strained by other basic problems. Why charge those pilfered by unscrupulous power users to those who are paying and using electricity honestly? What Meralco should do instead is to make full use of its monitoring potentials to catch those pilferers, in coordination with the police or barangay officials in the community. But Meralco is not doing anything to curb this illegal activity.
Perhaps, it doesn’t want to spend its budget for this purpose and just rely on the consumers, thinking that nobody is bold enough to read or understand as what is stipulated in the billing statement, based on the meter reading that each personnel did on a house-to-house basis.
It took the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) to take up the challenge and rise up to the situation. It was good chance for the GSIS to enliven its name by coming out with the issue on excessive electricity charges by Meralco, a public utility firm majority owned by the government. What is painful about this is that ordinary consumers can’t even complain to the proper authorities but the media. If they could, the Energy Regulatory Board is run by a former congressman, who was believed to be taking advantage of his position by accepting junket tours from the Lopezes.
How can we trust public officials who are like former Rep. Rodolfo Albano of Cagayan. It’s unfortunate that he was appointed by the administration to that position, when he couldn’t be trusted by the public for good. As far as I’m concerned, Meralco has the innate ability to confuse its clients with a long list of charges so that reading it would put one in a trance. Perhaps, the power firm has an alien way of making its accounting system work to deceive the public.
It’s about time that the government must rethink of a way to welcome other power firm to engage in electricity distribution so that monopoly can be avoided.