By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
The vulnerability of the national grid as pointed out by the head of Transco to tampering through the internet should send down shivers down every Filipino’s spine. More so, since the national grid is now operated and controlled by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP), a private entity, whose main owners are Chinese nationals representing the National Government of China.
While there are also Filipinos who own big chunks of the shares of NGCP, they are Filipino Chinese. Yes, it can be scary, if you are highly imaginative. More so with the fact that NGCP’s operation is highly computerized such that its systems can be hacked. Not just by China but by anybody or any other country. As revealed by the head of Transco, a part of the systems of NGCP went defective and it was repaired through the internet in Florid, USA. So if the systems can be fixed anywhere, these can also be destroyed or interfered with anywhere.
Here is another reality. Computers are knowledge based and since many of the best and the brightest Filipinos have migrated abroad, how can we match the tech savvy of other countries?
And our national level of technical capability is jurrasic. We can only protect our high-tech systems by being smarter than the others. But we might be a thousand years from there.
Which leads as to the point. What credibility does Transco have to be lecturing everybody about the national grid? When it was running it, it was very inefficient. Once a blackout happened and it was traced Transco systems, we had to prepare for days without power. This led to privatization and the national grid fell into the hands of NGCP – which obviously turned out to be a lot more efficient.
And NGCP was in touch with its clients, the Filipino people. In the Cordillera it had a very efficient PR people who had been going around to communicate with the public through the mass media. While it was not cheap as they had to pay for ads regarding advisories which were educating the people on how to be safe from power installations, at least the people were hearing and reading about NGCP.
How about Transco then? Mention its name and the comment is usually, “What’s that?” Some thought, and not without bases, that Transco was synonymous with extended blackouts.
While the point of Transco regarding the national grid and national security is valid, its incompetence in the past delivers only what we have known about our leaders, local and national, that they are only good in talking.
To deliver the point that it is a big blunder for big companies (private or government) not to maintain a good rapport with the public, just recall how the President, in the past few days, was lambasting with cuss words the Ayalas. If statistics can be taken right now, majority of the masses might go along with the President. They would think that PDu30 was doing something for them.
How about the Ayalas? A few months ago, a representative of the Ayala group of companies invited us in the media to have a roundtable powwow and lunch at John Hay. Of course it was a PR strategy but I did not attend. Aside from the fact that I had a court appearance at that time, the event was scheduled on a Friday when local papers were scrambling to finish their weekend issues to be printed the next day. It could have been scheduled for a better day,, but perhaps the executives of those companies who would meet with us intended that lousy schedule so they could have a free weekend junket to Baguio. They did not really intend to sincerely communicate with the people.
Now that the President is talking about filing charges against the Ayalas for economic sabotage, they badly need the people’s support. But who are they? We don’t know them—even if I had been holding offices in Makati for years.**
