A new alert about the risks, not only legal, but also energy sustainability in the country, has just been issued by a group of people, including former officials, after the National Government’s announcement to assume the functions of the Energy and Gas Regulation Commission and/or repeal the current legal framework.
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In the letter, which supports the “analysis and considerations on public services in the country,” prepared by former President César Gaviria Trujillo, the signatures of María Mercedes Cuéllar, former member of the board of directors of Banco de la República and former president of the Asobancaria; Juan Carlos Echeverry and Rudolf Hommes, former Finance Ministers; María Fernanda Suárez, former Minister of Mines and Energy, and Rosario Córdoba, former president of the Private Competitiveness Council, and 95 other personalities from the public and private business sphere, who agree that “even with good intentions, bad decisions can set us back 50 years and lead to a situation that we will regret.”
Consequently, it invites the Government and the members of congress and high courts to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and to appeal to what has been learned over the last decades.
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The foregoing, without ignoring that there is still a long way to go and improve in the provision of public services.
“This group, as stated in the document, recognizes that there are still challenges that require immediate attention, such as the increase in coverage in isolated rural areas; the improvement in the provision of services on the Caribbean coast (which is due to a particular situation and not a general one); greater openness to new agents and innovations; a better targeting of subsidies and the strengthening of regulation and supervision capacities”, they specify in the letter to the President Gustavo Petro.
They point out, however, that they are convinced that these challenges should and can be corrected by making the changes that are required within the existing legal and institutional framework.
And, straight away, the 100 signatories emphasize that it is necessary and inappropriate to repeal the laws 142 and 143 of 1994or ignore the regulatory commissions, in the face of which they are convinced that this will lead to “high uncertainty about the rules of the game, investments in public services will immediately arise.”
In his opinion, like that of many other experts who have spoken in recent weeks about the announcements and decisions of the Government to intervene in the public services market, “lower investments will result in increased risk in energy reliability and will make us go backwards in coverage, quality and efficiency”.
In this sense, it highlights how the country of 90s blackout and from a precarious situation in coverage and quality to a system with energy reliability, a coverage that went from 74 percent to close to 98 percent in electricity and from 9 to 64 percent in gas, among other advances.
