A will and way to simplify electric service

Long before the Occidental Mindoro electric predicament surfaced in the media, the horrors of Northern Davao Electric Cooperative’s (NORDECO) incompetent service in Northern Davao have been inflicting daily damage to its clients for years.

I’m not an expert on laws and the procedures in making them.

What I have is mere understanding of it.

I know and understand the plight of a client served with terrible and repeated lackluster service.

I’ve read media articles featuring sentiments of clients’ dire situations and burdens of incompetent service.

NORDECO clients’ plea are easy to understand and easier to empathize with.

The brownouts I experienced these past few years were few, yet I could say they were traumatic.

The heat, the inability to fully and productively function, were results of such electricity absence.

NORDECO’s clients are experiencing brownouts to as many as five times a day, horribly for years already.

And they’re paying higher rates compared to neighboring provinces served by other electric distribution units.

That’s unbearable.

Asking clients to get used to it is ridiculous.

As a consumer, technical explanations are tales I don’t need to understand.

My business is simply be served, and diligently pay for it.

There aren’t many options for supply source so those supply lines traversing along my house are such.

If only those street poles carry several electricity supply lines from different distribution units, then consumers like me can simply switch to the more competent provider.

That’s how it is for telephone and cable service.

Service providers entice us with better services.

As paying consumers, we get to choose the better one.

Sadly, for my fellow consumers in Northern Davao, the street poles, as how they are almost everywhere, carry only NORDECO’s unreliable supply.

Through the years, the provider’s excuses for their enduring incompetence are jargons of technical tales.

Putting myself into the shoes of Northern Davao folks, I simply don’t care and not expected to understand.

Competent distribution units will certainly will it and find ways immediately to satisfy the clients, especially NORDECO’s consumers who pay much higher rates.

I understand the recent rallies by the people of Northern Davao.

LGU officials, consumer organization, citizens — all are NORDECO’s clients — expressing their years of suffering.

You can’t blame their outcry and appeal for change. Their patience must have run out.

Mindoro energy woes have been solved temporarily according to the government. In the recent brownouts in Region 6, PBBM stepped in to help solve the problem. What about Northern Davao’s NORDECO dilemma, when will that be solved?

The technical explanations from NORDECO even got reinforcement from their accordingly Constitutional right to continue their incompetent service.

My shallow mind is revolting with the idea that my fellow consumers were told to suffer continuing incompetence because it’s in the law.

I am not capable to debate about Constitutionality or the law.

But I firmly believe laws are for the good and welfare of the people.

I leave it to the experts in the national legislature to have the will and find a way to uphold what laws are made for.

Congress has resumed session this week.

My elected representative is there to take care of legislative technicalities.

I need not be burdened with how things are done in those legislative halls.

What matters to me and certainly to the burdened NORDECO consumers is the simple bottom line: make the laws truly work for our welfare.

In the Senate, Energy Committee Chairman Senator Raffy Tulfo will live up as “idol,” as he is endearingly referred to, for the Northern Davao folks if he wills and makes way to resolve the incompetent electric service of NORDECO.

(The author is a civil engineer and a longtime resident of the Davao area, with his own small construction business).