Those of us who have had to suffer through a severe water shortage during a brutally hot summer are somewhat mollified to learn that Manila Water, the private concessionaire for Metro Manila’s east zone, has been fined P534 million and been compelled to put up a P600 million fund to develop a new water source, after it failed to meet its contractual obligations to supply tens of thousands of households and establishments with continuous water service.
We are also encouraged by a statement from Manila Water’s parent company, Ayala Corp., that the penalties will not be passed on to consumers.
“I think it's best we pay the fine. It would not be passed on to consumers, we will have to absorb it as a company and we move forward from here,” said Ayala Corp. President Fernando Zobel de Ayala said during the company's annual stockholders' meeting.
"We have had this problem, we’re dealing with it, we have to get through it and come out a stronger company at the end," Zobel added.
The fines, the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) says, will be paid in the form of deductions from the bills of for Manila Water’s customers, and could kick in by June.
But while the imposition of fines is a good first step, it is a far cry from closure for millions of customers who continue to suffer from Manila Water’s failure to this day. Manila Water likes to point out that it has restored water service to at least eight hours a day on the ground level to 99 percent of its customer base—as if this were an achievement for which it can take pride.
Are we supposed to be thankful that our faucets trickle out water during a third of the day, and that we have to scramble after midnight to collect water for the two-thirds of the remaining day? Would the president of Ayala Corp., we wonder, be happy with this in his household? Are eight hours a day of water dribbling from our faucets a worthy measure of success? It might be—in a Third World country.
Also, how much exactly, does the P500 million in fines translate to per person? The company says it services close to 7 million people. A fine of P500 million divided by so many users if a paltry P71 a person. Is that really sufficient or fair, for a company that posted profits of P6.5 billion, and whose parent company realized a net income of P31.8 billion in 2018? Would not any of us gladly have paid P71 extra to make sure we had continuous water service 24 hours a day?
And we have not even begun to count the cost of businesses that had to stop operating because they could not do so without an adequate water supply, which Manila Water had pledged to provide in its concession agreement.
The MWSS, as the state regulator, needs to address these issues—and make sure none of this Third World supply nonsense befalls any of us again—before it can claim to have made progress in dealing with the recent water crisis. And Manila Water really should stop pointing to its “eight-hours-a-day to 99 percent of its customers” statistic as a sign of progress. Because it really isn’t.