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WHEN I dropped in last week at the office of a townmate who is one
of the top executives of Globe Telecom, I asked him why, even on
moonlit evenings when you wish to have an intimate talk with
someone, you suddenly find your cell phone unable to transmit your
text messages, apparently dead. And yet we have a Globe Telecom
tower standing right in our town not far from our house.
With only about three kilo-meters away from our
place in the poblacion, I feel that there is inefficiency somewhere
in Globe’s services in the countryside. Such a performance is
unacceptable to people who have been assured by insistent promo that
the firm is aware of the importance of communication in their lives,
particularly the people who have family members among the overseas
workers.
When I unburdened my complaint to Jerry Yntig in
Globe’s Cebu office, he did not make excuses, but admitted humbly
a kind of failure on their service. He said, however, if you come
down to it, it is not really the fault of his company. “Our
company’s biggest problem in Cebu is the thievery of telephone
cables. We are heaviest hit in at least two municipalities—Naga
and Balamban.”
Balamban, of course, is my hometown where the
two biggest shipbuilding firms are located. According to Yntig, the
state of the Philippine economy has something to do with it. “We
lost a lot last year. In Cebu alone our losses through thievery was
about P8 million, and the greater percentage of that goes to
Balamban and Naga.” When I asked what could be the reason, he said
tersely that it’s poverty.
It seems the bronze recovered from the re-melted
wire that is about a kilometer long is easily worth about P10
thousand, more or less. Telephone lines follow the electric power
lines. This is placed right below the electric cable, so the chances
of thieves being electrocuted is practically nil. Thieves come in
motorcycles. They climb up the telephone poles and cut the wire.
Then they move to another area, a kilometer away. During the first
two months of the year, his company lost about P800 thousand in Cebu
alone, not counting the rest of Central Visayas. This, in essence,
is the effect of poverty among our people, and this is only in one
of our industries. Although our economy is considered quite robust,
its “health” is not felt in the countryside. The reported growth
in the economy has not really seeped down to the countryside.
It is decidedly disturbing to note that the
number of poor Filipino families has reportedly increased in recent
months. This means that the gains of the economy benefited only the
middle and upper levels of society. Such a situation should not be
acceptable to a nation where the people deserve to enjoy the fruits
of development. Yet, recent figures released by the National
Statistical Coordination Board on the 2006 Official Poverty
Statistics revealed the “incidence of poor Filipino families was
26.9 percent in 2006, compared to 24.4 percent three years
earlier.” If we take the whole gamut of corporate entities dealing
in the basic needs of our hungry poor that total 7.6 million,
imagine the total amount of food we still need.
I am sure that food poverty among our poor is
the unkindest of all forms of poverty, and it is what drives many of
them to commit crimes. Hunger among our poor deserves priority from
our government. And rather that nitpick on graft and corruption, we
should give priority to our poor families, especially with children.
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