Sudah Sakit Dipijak Oleh TNB Pula

RAJA SARA PETRA

In the UK, business owners are being given RM54,000 grants and one-year interest-free loans up to 20% of their annual turnover to help them stay afloat. Banks and credit card companies are giving three-month holidays to offer relief to those impacted by the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. Retailers are giving up to 70% discount for online shoppers to make it more affordable for cash-strapped buyers to purchase goods and services.

In Malaysia, the opposition is protesting the rescue packages that the government has implemented and has labelled all this government assistance as illegal and unconstitutional because, according to them, the opposition members of parliament have yet to debate these packages in parliament. When the ship is sinking and you have only a few hours to live, are debates in parliament crucial to saving lives?

But the unkindest cut of all is Tenaga Nasional Berhad charging consumers two or three times the normal cost for electricity usage. The excuse is: circumstances did not allow the TNB meter-readers to read those meters (because of Covid-19) so, instead of reading them once a month, TNB reads them three months once. And this results in the bills spiking to two or three times the usual cost.

Was it not 30 years or so ago that Leo Moggie announced TNB was going to replace the manually-read meters with remote-reading meters? How many Malaysian households now have remote-reading meters or will it take another 70 years to fully install these meters? Maybe by then we would no longer be using electricity.

Consumers are being made to pay for TNB’s inefficiency and for the Covid-19 tragedy. Meanwhile, TNB’s profit for year-ended December 2019 rose by 18.7% to RM4.45 billion from RM3.75 billion previously, against earnings that jumped 3.5% to RM49.02 billion from RM47.36 billion in 2018.

I am sure with the extra profit TNB is squeezing from Malaysians due to the Covid-19 pandemic, their year-end results for December 2020 is going to jump yet again. Is this what they call “the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer”? So not everyone is suffering from Covid-19, isn’t it? And why will TNB not sacrifice some profits (not asking them to make a loss, just reduce some profit) when everyone else is being asked to sacrifice?