Why privatize MCWD?

There are as many views on the operation and management of MCWD as there are people reading the current news involving Atty. Jose Daluz and Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama. The two former political allies have recently been on a collision course, if their escalating vitriolic public pronouncements on the perceived privatization of the MCWD were to be considered. Whoever said that in politics there are no permanent friends but only permanent interests or words to that effect, he had in his mind future adversaries in lawyers Daluz and Rama.

The tendency for ordinary mortals like me is to gravitate to the side of their preferred warring leaders. We flank and move in cadence with our general’s command. In the process, we not only add fuel to the raging fire stoked by our bosses, we help blur reasons with emotions. Having said that, let me veer myself free from the flux of divergent opinions, and attempt to steer to a point which I believe represents the interest of the general public. I dare to surmise that there are others espousing my idea.

In order to give substance to my stand, I personally consider two things as important in looking at the MCWD especially on the reported issue of its supposed privatization. The first is that water is life. That MCWD is business comes in as the second.

I am confident that nobody disagrees with the statement that all animals and plants need water to survive. It is an indisputable fact that water is life. Even the most raucous of all negative people will agree with the proposition that without water all living things will die. These statements support the first of the two things I mentioned above.

Now the second. Because all life forms need water, it is the marketable commodity that will never run out of customers. Yet, water is free. Nature provides water. Man does not make rivers. Springs are not creations of man. For instance, when I punched two holes into my small property in the mountain, water gushed out to become open wells from which my neighbors get water to drink and to use for bathing and washing their clothes. Still, free water is getting to be man’s business.

MCWD began as the Osmeña Waterworks System created and organized by the act of the Cebu City Council in 1910. It was funded and fully owned by Cebu City. Upon the stroke of Presidential Decree 198, it was converted into a quasi-public corporation. As a quasi-public corporation, it operated as it still does as a big business entity with vast resources, sizeable manpower, and supposedly raking in some profits.

Private corporations are organized for profit. People invest money to capitalize corporations for no other purpose than to earn more money out of their investment. Private business enterprise including the water aspect of the Villar group, salivates at the chance of taking over a fully-structured and completely operational MCWD as the one to bring water to a ready market, the Cebuanos. Water being free, the cost of putting water into the faucets in homes is the only expense. Perhaps it will improve the existing system but such a cost is much smaller than starting a business, any business. Naturally, the margin of profits can be higher. Then it can also use the streamlining of operations as justification of still increasing the consumers’ water bills.

This is where government leaders should rethink the idea. There is no logic in privatizing the MCWD, by itself a thriving business of over a hundred years, to a private entity (like the Villar group). Better still let government give technical experts and provide needed additional capital to the MCWD that can assure future generations of Cebuanos this basic need.