Electric co-ops: Cusi, Juaneza caused us to suffer

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The Philippine Rural Electric Cooperatives Association Inc. (Philreca) on Monday joined other industry groups calling for Energy Secretary Alfonso Cusi and National Electrification Administration (NEA) chief Emmanuel Juaneza’s resignation, this time for “consistently making electric cooperatives suffer” during their terms.

In separate statements given during a virtual briefing, the group’s leaders said the NEA had issued guidelines that did not just violate prevailing laws in the power industry but could be used to benefit “oligarchs and the select few.”

The group expressed their opposition to the issuance of two memoranda, 2021-055 and 2021-056, which effectively gave the NEA the power to appoint and select the general managers (GMs) for electric cooperatives (ECs), effectively stripping core members of ECs the right to decide.

Overreaching its functions

“First and foremost, the power to hire, select and appoint a GM has always been and should always be with the people who own the ECs—the member-consumer-owners (MCOs)—and as their direct representatives, we, the board of directors, are empowered by the constitutions and by-laws of the ECs to appoint the GM. Even previous issuances of the NEA were aligned [with] this,” Gloria Corrales, president of the Philippine Association of Board of Directors of Rural Electric Cooperatives, Inc. said. “At the very least, NEA is overreaching its functions and mandate. These memoranda are anti-ECs and anti-MCOs. If this is not injustice to the ECs, then we don’t know what is.”

Standoff

The controversy was also triggered by the NEA’s appointment of Ana Maria Paz Rafael Banaag in August last year as Benguet Electric Cooperative’s (Beneco) new general manager following the retirement of its previous GM, the late Gerardo Versoza.

The appointment resulted in a standoff between Banaag and NEA officials on one side and Beneco’s officers and employees on the other.

The appointment of a GM is crucial in maintaining the operations of an EC as he/she is also responsible for the management of a co-op’s annual budget.

Philreca Rep. Presley de Jesus reiterated that NEA’s mandate was only to oversee the operations of ECs and not to have direct control over them.