Monday, October 01, 2007 Ong: ZTE project: Milking a potential white elephant By Ted Aldwin Ong Misreadings
THE accusations and the counter charges hurled against each other among those invited in the Senate inquiry serves as a reminder on our government's predilection of railroading fundamental processes in implementing projects.
If this could happen to a whopping $329 million National Broadband Project what more with other government transactions? Various opinions have been moving around on the integrity of the Chinese company whose role figured prominently in the bribery offer allegedly peddled by Comelec chairman Benjamin Abalos in order to fix the approval of government in favor of ZTE.
What is realizable, however, is the fact that it is not the first time for the government, more so for the Arroyo administration, to bump into questionable multi-billion dealings involving government projects which were white elephants or has the potential of becoming one.
The ZTE deal on the NBN project has all the necessary recipe of becoming one. For instance, there is no existing financial analysis and plan for an NBN project.
This is apparent in the testimonies of government agencies involve in the process. The implementing agency is blind to any feasibility study and has not initiated any detailed engineering studies, plans, specifications and design for the said broadband project. This entire aspect was tasked to ZTE alone.
Likewise, it suffers from a crisis of transparency. It is alleged that there is a lack of competitive bidding which led to the overpricing of the project. A similar project proposal by the Amsterdam Holdings Inc. at US$240 million costs a lot cheaper than the ZTE's offer. The discussions were cloaked in doubt on whether this project falls under an executive agreement or a supply contract.
It also endures from a crisis of relevance with a question on how NBN could be maximized in connecting municipalities all over the country that falls under the vague category referred to as the "the last mile" with whose system remains non-electronic to this day.
Simply put, the NBN project is nothing but a potential white elephant whose costs will be borne by the Filipino people as an additional burden for payments of debts.
This would be an added burden for the Philippine government already owns two broadband networks-the Philippine Administrative Network Project (PANP) supposedly to modernize our government's news and information network and the Philippine Research, Education and Government Information Network (PREGINET) tasked to interconnect academic institutions, government offices and research and development centers in the country.
We have not learned our lesson over years of government's deliberate waste of public funds in the mothballed Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP). It took us 30-years to finish paying off BNPP-a power plant that was constructed on an earthquake fault and an energy-generating facility that never produced a single watt of electricity.
It cost the Filipino people a total of US$2.67 billion, over three decades of burdensome debts, with the last tranche of $ 15million paid April this year.
The enormous amount of money that was marked up to overprice the NBN project is evidence that this project will serve as a milking cow of the Arroyo regime and the middleman's ultimate retirement dream and the envy of racketeers and profiteers. It clearly dwarfs to the point of embarrassment the original white elephant-the Bataan power plant. (Comments to tao.kolumnista@gmail.com)
