Development authority gears up drive for ECs’ registration

By Loui S. Maliza

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

IN EFFORT to give justice to electric cooperatives (ECs) consumer-members, the Cooperative Development Authority (CDA) in Northern Mindanao, announced Tuesday of bringing its drive to the common concessionaires to help push for the registration of ECs to the cooperative department.

Edwin B. Pelosas, CDA-Northern Mindanao’s cooperative development specialist, said the electric cooperatives genuinely possess an accreditation with the CDA, the latter directly supervises the organizational structure of the ECs, of which the person with highest power to control over cooperatives is the general assembly.

“It’s the people now who will dominate…especially on the determination of salaries and allowances and other perks of the members of the board of directors (BODs). BODs just meet once in a while, but then they are the ones receiving the highest pay,” Pelosas said in an interview Tuesday.

“It should be the people in the management side and the employees who receive what these BODs are paying themselves,” Pelosas added.

He said once an EC is recognized as genuine cooperative, the member-consumers would have high chance of getting their returns of investments every end of the year in the form of dividends, “yet they (member-consumers) were required to pay.

Earlier, the CDA announced, that out of 199 ECs, only 14 ECs are registered with the cooperative department even as it actively advocating and campaigning for the registration and conversion of these ECs into genuine cooperatives.

Pelosas said ECs under the supervision of the CDA would promote social justice, equity and economic development.

“This is like an empowering path, a way to make life better for the poor and the struggling Filipino people,” he added.

http://bit.ly/r656f7