MonRam, the ever-hopeful and visionary people’s engineer
HOTSPOT
Tonyo Cruz
One of my favorite activists is in the hospital. We can only hope that he recovers, because we want to see him again online and offline. My admiration of him started years ahead of his being a regular reader and fan of this column.
His name is Ramon Ramirez: proud son of Albay, topnotcher in the 1967 electrical engineering boards, project site electrical engineer in charge of the country’s first automated dairy products plant, pre-martial law activist, political detainee in 1973 and in 1992, and perhaps most popular among changemakers as founder of “Arkibong Bayan” and as founding convenor of the alliance People Opposed to Warrantless Electricity Rates, whose campaigns won for consumers billions in refunds from Meralco.
Known simply as “MonRam,” his lifelong commitment to science and technology for the people has won him acclaim even from the establishment: The UP Alumni Engineers named him the National Achievement Awardee in Public Services in 2019. The UP Alumni Association bestowed on him an award for social cohesion in 2011.
When a couple of young activists and professionals founded the consumer advocacy group TXTPower in 2001, MonRam was always eager to offer counsel and advice.
Forward-looking than his contemporaries and many much younger activists, MonRam already insisted more than 10 years ago that telecommunications expenses were already essentials and cannot be looked down as frivolous spending.
In his many private messages, he advised us to fight not just for lower rates and better services, but also against monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies in the telecommunications sector whose superprofits come at the expense of the public’s growing needs.
Every time we battled either the telcos or the government that enables them, whether at the NTC hearings or congressional meeting, MonRam would cheer us on because each battle is a step forward to raising the awareness of consumers, and in making telecommunications serve the public day-to-day and be transformed as enablers of national industrialization, not just a sector that gives “tubing lugaw” to oligarchs and their foreign partners.
TXTPower turns 20 exactly today, by the way, as I write this. It is a milestone that MonRam would’ve celebrated in Facebook posts if he were not brought to the hospital.
MonRam was already in his senior years when he reentered the national spotlight as Engineer Ramirez in the early 2000s when together with the legendary Representative Crispin Beltran and many others, they formed the multi-stakeholder POWER coalition. Together, they exposed the “purchased power adjustment” or PPA — in their words, “kuryenteng di natin ginagamit pero binabayaran natin” to the tune of billions of pesos.
Meralco had to contend with both Ka Bel and MonRam whose counsel and knowledge as 1967 electrical engineering board topnotcher helped people unravel the mess that was the PPA.
Soon after came the litigation, and later an order from the Supreme Court directing Meralco to refund customers this PPA. For months, consumers benefited from refunds, rebates and discounts.
MonRam also became Bong Arki — the one-man operation behind hundreds of thousands of photos and thousands of statements that one could see on Arkibong Bayan.
Antedating the rise of social media that now allows any one of us to self-publish from the comfort of our homes and even while mobile, MonRam single handedly transformed Arkibong Bayan into the definitive source of multimedia about and by activists. I wonder where his voluminous photos collections have gone. They are now archival materials documenting the contemporary history of the mass movement and activism for at least 15 years, including the second People Power uprising.
The science and technology community of activists honored him in March 2014 when he turned 70.
In 2018, when the government started to compensate the Marcos dictatorship’s victims, MonRam was there to celebrate alongside other claimants.
MonRam wrote on Facebook: “This validates the incontrovertible fact that Marcos and his martial law regime committed human rights violations and the state acknowledges it and makes amends via the recognition and reparation.”
For MonRam and his comtemporaries who fought in resistance, it was a ringing vindication that what they did was right, and that the state was wrong in its brutality and terror.
As of press time, MonRam is still critical in the hospital. We can only hope he recuperates. He still has a lot of stories to tell us, and a lot more nation-building to take part in as a people’s engineer. Meantime, we scroll through his timeline on Facebook, and learn from his ever-hopeful and visionary takes on the country and the world. ###
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