Indonesia’s capital dilemma
Government determination to move to a new location is not matched by public enthusiasm for abandoning Jakarta
Having heard for months from the media about government plans to move the administrative capital from Jakarta, Indonesians had a clearer picture when President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo formally placed the idea before the country’s parliament in August.
So far, the government has completed part of the spadework in preparation for the transfer: Conducting a three-year study and requesting parliament’s consent for the plan to move the capital to a location in East Kalimantan province, on Borneo, an island Indonesia shares with Malaysia and Brunei.
Jokowi, who began his second and final term on Oct. 20, had formally asked the public to sign off on the plan during his annual state of the nation address in August. Ten days later he announced that the government had earmarked 180,000 hectares of land straddling the districts of North Penajam Paser and Kutai Kartanegara in East Kalimantan province for the new capital. Jokowi has pegged the cost of the relocation of the capital from Jakarta at $33 billion. He claims the government will need to carry only 19 percent of the cost, while the remainder will be taken care of by private investment and publicprivate partnership schemes.
The National Development Planning Agency, or Bappenas, has fixed 2021 as the year for the groundbreaking of the project. It will launch the transfer process by the end of 2024, the year Joko’s presidential term ends.
Defending the decision to select images show that East Kalimantan is one of the provinces with the highest number of hotspots, or areas where fires are detected. Greenpeace, the environmental watchdog, has pointed out that during the 2015 forest fires, 3,487 hotspots were found in the Kutai Kartanegara district alone. Leonard Simanjuntak, Greenpeace Indonesia’s country director, said that environmental concerns should be considered before the capital is relocated. “The threat posed by the global climate crisis or the environmental mismanagement of Jakarta should not be a reason to cut and run by moving the capital,” he told Arab News. “However, it must provide a wake-up call and become a major consideration in Indonesia’s development strategy going forward. The relocation of our capital will only shift environmental problems or create new ones,” he said.
The government, though, envisions the new capital as a city built from scratch, with at least 50 percent green spaces; less dependence on private vehicles thanks to an integrated publictransport network, bicycle lanes and wide pedestrian paths; buildings with green designs; renewables meeting part of the energy requirements; and “smart” water and waste management systems. Despite its determination to go ahead with the capital transfer, the government has yet to rally public opinion behind the idea. A survey by Kedai Kopi, a political pollster, in August showed that 95.7 percent of respondents who were from Jakarta disagreed with the idea of transfering the capital.
Across the country, the percentage of respondents who did not support the idea was 39.8 percent. This was higher than the number of respondents who agreed with the plan (35.6 percent) and who had no opinion on the issue (24.6 percent).
“It is no wonder that most respondents from Jakarta disagreed with the plan since they would be the most impacted by the move,” said Kunto Wibowo, the executive director of Kedai Kopi. The concerns are well founded. Jakarta is notorious for its traffic congestion and air quality in addition to being a sinking city due to land subsidence (at a rate of 1cm to 15cm annually).
In another national survey, conducted by pollster Median, 45.3 percent of 1,000 respondents did not agree with the capitaltransfer idea compared to the 40.7 percent who agreed.
Rico Marbun, executive director of Median, said that 58.6 percent of respondents felt the government ought to tackle more pressing issues, notably a stagnant economy, poverty and public welfare, unemployment and lack of opportunities; social unrest in Papua and West Papua provinces, and infrastructure.
Nirwono Joga, an urban planning expert at Jakarta’s Trisakti University, said: “If there were funds available to develop a new capital, it would be wiser to divert it to accelerate urban development in other cities. We can’t stop people from moving to Jakarta but we can avert it by developing new economic zones outside the greater Jakarta area and outside Java.”
Jokowi, meanwhile, has been assuring Indonesians that “Jakarta will continue to be developed as an international and regional business, finance, trade and service hub. The city administration has allocated 571 trillion rupiahs ($40.1 billion) for urban regeneration in the city.” An estimated 10 million Indonesians live in Jakarta proper. If the population of the satellite cities is included, many of whom commute into the capital every day, the total figure is 30 million.
The principal city of Java, Indonesia’s most populated island, Jakarta is home to about 149 million people — or more than half of the country’s total population. As such, Jakarta’s status as Indonesia’s business and finance capital is not under any immediate threat, and it also has a certain intangible edge over other Indonesian cities. As Fadli Zon, a former deputy House Speaker, said recently, it is the city where the country’s independence was declared and the state ideology Pancasila developed, as well as where the constitution was formulated and drafted.
“This collective memory is what unites us as a nation,” he said.