Allow us to dream. At this time in our history when we are faced with that rare opportunity to finally install in Malacañang a truly decent person, armed with clear and well-crafted platforms to deliver us from ancient evils that curse our democracy as well as rescue us from the current demons who distort it, it bears challenging twisted fate and daring to dream.

Nationwide, good people are rallying behind an uncorrupted, intelligent, patriotic, and truly honest individual who has captured our hearts and minds as she stands among us in another episode of a medieval morality play pitting good versus bad, and virtue versus vice.

The timing could not have been better. From the darkest and deepest graves where we buried the rotted remains of a dead dictatorship, from accursed dust another is resurrecting. Truth and historical facts be damned. The seed does not simply revise, it distorts factual history. However confronted with this nightmare, we remain emboldened to dream of better tomorrows.

Unfortunately, dreaming remains fraught with present-day challenges if not downright harassment. It is not just a product of childhood nighttime fears. Evil lurks. There are very real monsters under our bed.

The festering Malampaya controversy is a case in point. The righteous who sought judicial recourse have not only been openly vilified employing unrelenting ad hominem, vitriol and invective-laced PR campaigns, but their patriotism, pilloried and defiled.

Media itself has not been spared where the constitutional guarantees on freedom of expression are totally ignored.

Good men and women however stay the course and soldier on. In the Malampaya controversy, at stake is Philippine sovereignty and energy security.

In a rather unexpected twist of fate, while we are besieged by escalating fuel prices and runaway inflation due to our dependence on imported fuels and the war in Ukraine, the Malampaya controversy presents some real and immediate answers.

Allow us snippets of this Malampaya dream if only we can get ourselves to do the right thing, correct wrongdoing and reclaim millions lost to greed.

Adjusted for inflation, the present values of a 4-year cash stream and the cost of money since Malampaya’s 2020 sell-out, foregone revenues of over P50 million a day could have funded better uses rather than being hocked to a technically unqualified private start-up.

Pending the resolution of graft and corruption complaints filed with the Ombudsman, had an injunction cauterized Malampaya’s bloodletting, what might P50 million a day be used on as discussed in a teleconference on Ukraine and its impact on Malampaya and the West Philippine Sea?

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To alleviate runaway inflationary increases in pump prices, P50 million daily revenues - the equivalent of P18 billion yearly - can fund a P6,500 fuel subsidy for as many as 377,443 public utility (PUV) drivers equivalent to two months of their income.

From the P18 billion, half a billion can fund a fuel subsidy for farmers and fishermen and allot as much as P8 billion for a P300 per month cash aid to two million of the most destitute.

The lost P50 million daily can purchase as many as 1,200 hand tractors for our farmers. For fisherfolk, it can supply large fiberglass-hulled fishing vessels daily, thus empowering fishermen victimized by a feckless presidential foreign policy covering our aquatic resources in the West Philippine Sea.

Dreaming on, we could have built as many as 360 five-story school buildings complete with laboratories, or thirty large state-of-the-art fully-equipped provincial hospitals. We could also have granted healthcare workers as much as P5,000 in incremental allowances.

Unfortunately, instead of a dream, our officials have inflicted on us a nightmare.

(Dean dela Paz is a former investment banker and a managing director of a New Jersey-based power company operating in the Philippines. He is the chairman of the board of a renewable energy company and is a retired Business Policy, Finance and Mathematics professor.)

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