Roperos: Conflict over power

By Godofredo M. Roperos
Politics also
Wednesday, October 12, 2011


WHAT seems to be a simple matter of having immediate access to an energy supply has somehow become a source of social conflict. Suddenly, we realize that our contemporary life has become bound to society’s modern inventions to make existence easy.


Our efforts to live a life of ease have set us adrift into a whirlpool of socio-economic mix that has made things more complex for most of us. The appurtenances that science and technology produced for human use have made our life socially complex instead.


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Thus, we note with utter distress the increase in the number of people who are materially deprived and less privileged. The number of our people who are considered poor or living below the poverty line rises in direct proportion to the increase in the cost of living. Thus, it would seem that the social reality in our present life is that the poor becomes poorer and the rich richer.


As a consequence, we are now confronted with the rising cost of power being supplied by power distributors and generators. The issue here is that while those who have middle level incomes may not mind the rise in power rates, those who live below the poverty line but want to enjoy life’s comforts that one can access only through the use of energy will be frustrated.


There is something in the current problem about the increase in the cost of power. It reminds us of the discontent of the masses in the ‘50s and the ‘60s when social unrest was intense and destabilizing. This happened in Central Luzon and some areas in the islands of Panay, Samar and Negros Occidental and some provinces in Mindanao, together with the Muslim rebellion in Sulu and Southern Mindanao.


The material deprivation of the masses then, especially since the development of mass media technology that has brought to the rural areas cheap battery-operated radios, has intensified the rural folks’ material need. And the more they hunger for material comforts, the more they become socially discontented.


When overseas employment became available to rural inhabitants, they were endowed with the buying power that made available to them electrical appliances that can only be enjoyed with access to energy and power.


Do we need to elaborate further about the problem that we face now? Truly, there is genuine need to control the cost of energy. When it comes to energy and power, the government must be pro-poor.


Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on October 13, 2011.