The Manila Water’s threat: Serious or sewage?

ACCORDING to media reports, Manila Water warned the Supreme Court that it would raise water rates by 780% if the fine the court imposed for violation of its sewage water treatment obligations would not be reconsidered. The obligations are based on the law and the terms of its exclusive franchise.

If the media report is correct, Manila Water is not only asking for the reconsideration of the court’s ruling; more than this, it is threatening the court and telling the nation: reverse the ruling, or suffer untold miseries.

Involved in the consolidated cases are two giants in the Philippine business sector – Manila Water whose main investors are the Ayala/Zobel interests; and Maynilad, whose main investor is Metro Pacific Investments Corporation. Both companies are also giants in many other business activities imbued with public interest, among them, telecommunication, media, and energy generation and distribution.

To be sure, either of these companies – by itself, together, or through their controlled companies – can bring about the dire consequences that Manila Water supposedly threatens in its motion. They can indeed harm public interest if they want to. And in all likelihood, the owners of Manila Water fully know the import of the threat and to whom it is directly addressed; it has not been without experience in dealing with the court.

In considering the present motion, I suggest that the court take a look and derive lessons from Republic, et al. v. Judge De los Angeles, Enrique Zobel, et al., G.R. L -30240, that saw then Chief Justice Claudio Teehankee, in 1988, bewailing the efforts of the respondents to thwart the execution of the court’s 1965 ruling.

The 1965 ruling found that the respondents enlarged their property “from 9,652.583 hectares to about 12,000 hectares, thereby usurping about 2,000 hectares consisting of portions of the territorial sea, the foreshore, the beach, and navigable waters properly belonging to the public domain.”

Twenty years after, or in 2008 when I joined the court, the execution of the court’s 1965 decision was still pending; to my recollection, the RTC judge handling the execution could not find land registry records and this failure effectively stalled the full execution of the 1965 decision.

They say that there are many ways of skinning a cat. Republic v. Delos Angeles may be one; a threat may be another. A big difference, though, exists between the first mode and the second.

In the 1965/1988 case, the court’s frustrated efforts might have transpired without triggering massive public outcry because the public interest directly involved was local. Times were unsettled, too, and our Constitution was new. Social media at that time was negligible.

At stake in the present case, on the other hand, is a whole lot more – the water supply of the people of Metropolitan Manila under the Manila Water–Maynilad franchises.

More than this, the present dispute relates to the treatment of sewage that flows into Manila Bay, substantially polluting the Bay, killing its aquatic life, and depriving the people of Metro Manila of their food source and livelihood.

This time, clear national interest is at stake as Metro Manila is our center of government, diplomacy, finance, culture, education, and the economy, and had a population of almost 13 million in 2015.

The court and the President, no less, must thus act and use their vast array of enforcement tools. Response from Congress should also be forthcoming as the whole government is called upon to respond when national interest is involved.

After reading the exhaustive ponencia of Justice Ramon Paul L. Hernando, I can discern why Manila Water had to resort to threats. Justice Hernando’s ruling covered all bases, from the importance of water and its proper treatment, the history and applicability of the covering rules and legislation, to the manner the respondents violated the law and the conditions of their franchise. The good justice, in short, issued a strong ruling.

I will not say anything more beyond these comments, out of respect for the court and its rule against comments on matters sub judice.

Let me caution though that the present case and the respondent’s threat may have impact beyond the violation and the fine imposed; it may even trigger the use of the Constitution’s reserve powers; or a change in the court’s interpretative perspectives, when and if proper; and, possibly, the re-thinking of the liberal democratic governance model that we follow.

For a long time, we have been following the American liberal democratic model of governance based on our Constitution whose terms we largely borrowed from the US. For some time under this model, we were the leading light that other countries in Asia looked up to because of our relative economic prosperity.

But things have changed since then. The liberalism that focused on individual rights has not proven itself wholly successful in its Philippine incarnation; it may now even threaten long held and cherished native traditions, among them, those relating to gender and marriage.

The market economy that accompanies a liberal democracy has not at all liberated the greater number of our people from poverty; 20% or so of our people still live in extreme poverty with no immediate alleviation in sight.

If our market economy has exhibited favorable results at all, these results are in favor of the elite, among whom are the controlling interests of Manila Water and Maynilad. The gap separating them from the poor, in fact, has been widening rather than narrowing. Our middle class has not gathered strength.

Generally, therefore, the American model of liberal democracy has not provided widespread beneficial results. In contrast, our Asian neighbors, while labelling themselves as liberal democracies, never fully bought into the liberal democratic concepts of primacy of individual rights and the rule of market forces. They did not forget the collective interest, gave due weight to the interest of the nation, and governed themselves accordingly.

The present times now see us, not only lagging behind most of our neighboring countries, but saddled by unsettling problems due mostly to unfulfilled popular expectations. Economically, we may even be surpassed in the near future by a country that only 40 years ago was still recovering from the ravages of war.

Under these circumstances and with dawning realization of the need for newer governing perspectives, we might just find ourselves moving, from our present system of governance, towards the opposite direction, or to some place in between appropriate to our needs as a nation.

Some might even claim that the country has already begun moving, starting with the election of President Duterte whose life and beginnings have not been elitist; who won without the support of the elite; and whose support by the masses, after three years in office, is still substantial. Even the court has moved when it interpreted

the martial law provisions expansively.

Let us wait and see what will happen to Manila Waters’ threat and how the resulting interaction will impact on our nation’s future directions.