Many things surfaced in the midst of this Covid-19 crisis. There’s the violence of inequality and the blindness of privilege. There’s the lack of vision and planning for a massive public health emergency that any government should’ve known was coming early in the year. There’s government’s incompetence and violence, the President in-over-his-head (yet again!), his men grasping at straws and deciding that going deeper into debt is the answer to our woes. There are Duterte’s cronies and allies, getting away with keeping their businesses intact and operational, probably even earning from this crisis, and now all set on getting a tax cut while thousands of small businesses will go under, and thousands of Filipinos go hungry.

There is also the fact that big business will abuse the people. It’s not a matter of when, but a matter of how. And the past four years this Duterte government has stood by and watched these abuses happen; during the lockdown it did nothing about construction workers left by developers to fend for themselves at construction sites, grocery workers walking inhumane distances to and from work, medical workers with no way to get home from hospitals.

With government turning a blind eye to these abuses, it’s no surprise that a business like Meralco will take this already difficult time and think: how do we make money in this time of crisis, when most everyone is taking a hit?

Well, they figured it out: they did so by bloating people’s electricity bills. They did so by sending all of us an estimated billing, one that’s based on nothing, because there was no meter reading at all throughout the lockdown, from March and April. Meralco decided to presume that our consumption for those months of no meter reading is the average of our consumption from December 2019 to February 2020. And then it added that invented billing to what they say was an actual meter reading which they did for May—never mind that many of us haven’t seen the Kuya-meter-reader all month.

That, they say, is what makes for that jacked up graph on our bills—it’s what Meralco has presumed we consume. It’s numbers they’ve gotten out of thin air.

To try and do damage control, Meralco has insisted that they will let us pay in four monthly payments for this billing, because according to its representative:

“Hindi naman kami walang puso na we will disconnect at a time na alam naman natin na kailangan ng customers namin ang service ng kuryente.” <We are not heartless as to disconnect people’s electricity at a time when we know they need our services. — trans. mine> 

But why are the options only between making us pay or cutting our electrical services? 

Why can’t the complete cancellation of our bills during lockdown be the answer? After all a majority of Filipinos have lost their means of livelihood, and even the middle class is on tenterhooks with dwindling savings and employment uncertainty.

After all, Meralco earned a whopping P22.41 billion in 2019 alone, and had a core net income of P5.7 billion in the first quarter of 2020 alone. 

Certainly if Meralco truly had heart, if it cared at all for the people, it could take this burden of electrical bills off our shoulders, at least for the two months that we were under lockdown, when a majority lost jobs and employment, and a larger majority is now unsure about the future.

If Meralco doesn’t want to seem so heartless, it should apologize to all of us for those estimated bills, and tell us that we don’t need to pay it. We can wait for a bill that only has the May reading and pay that. Meralco could have the heart and compassion, and certainly can afford the generosity, to tell us that they will not bill us for the months they were unable to read our meters.

This is all very simple. Electricity is a basic service. It shouldn’t be a business to begin with that seeks profit margins in the billions. But here we are, stuck with Meralco. The least it can do is decide that it will not be unkind, it will not be heartless, that it will not be a greedy capitalist in the face of a pandemic. The least it can do is to suspend the bills of private homes and small and medium enterprises, for the duration of the NCR-wide lockdown.

So many small and medium enterprises have been feeding the people, have been assisting our frontliners, have been doing work for their communities during the lockdown, using their own resources, energies, and funds to help out in the midst of this crisis. So many more private individuals are doing the same. Meanwhile a majority are hungry, and jobless. The least Meralco can do is give us all a break.

Sure Meralco and MVP can say: but look at the millions we put out and gave government! Sure. But unlike Meralco, majority of us do not have 22 BILLION IN EARNINGS FROM 2019. Unlike Meralco, we are not out to be greedy capitalists in the midst of an ongoing crisis. Unlike Meralco, we do not hold in our hands a basic service such as electricity.

If there’s any time at all for Meralco to prove that it even so much as cares for the people, it is at this time. If there is any time at all for it to deliver this basic service as a public service, it is at this time. Because guess what, we will not forget. We will not forget that in the midst of a pandemic, in the face of a global crisis, what Meralco did was to pluck presumed kilowatt consumptions out of thin air, hiked up our bills to more than double the standard amount, and then it had the heartlessness to send these bills out.

The old normal had us suffering in the hands of multi-billion-peso corporations like Meralco. In the new normal, we should be taking a stand against this abuse. ***