A lesson in transparency

Ahmad Suaedy, Asia Foundation, Jakarta

Gorontalo may be Indonesia's newest, or 32nd province, and its governor, Ir H. Fadel Muhammad, may be rumored to be subject to a travel ban. But the residents of Gorontalo have begun to implement transparency and to exercise supervision over their administration for the sake of good governance.

While other regions are striving to raise not only locally generated revenue but also legislators' salaries by producing new bylaws, the Gorontalo municipality in the north of Sulawesi is trying hard to improve public participation and transparency.

About a month after the first anniversary of the establishment of the Gorontalo province on Feb. 16, the municipality produced three bylaws that reflected efforts to supervise the administration and to encourage public participation in city planning. These three bylaws concerned community-based development planning (No. 2/2002), transparency in the administration (No. 3/2002) and supervision over the administration (No. 4/2002).

Ratified on March 13, these bylaws are binding for the regional administration and set forth clear penalties for violations. Moreover, city planning must start at the subdistrict level upward -- the other way round from the New Order era.

Of course, these bylaws did not come out of the blue. At first, non-governmental organizations urged the local administration and legislature to encourage public participation and provide information.

"It wasn't easy," said Nixon Ahmad, the coordinator of a forum of non-governmental organizations that facilitated the establishment of these three bylaws. They brought together community members, legislators and the authorities.

At first, following the empowerment of the community by a number of non-governmental organizations, the legislative and executive bodies were approached about the possibility of a regulation on administrative transparency and public participation.

Luckily, there was a rule that an initiative from the legislative assembly could be raised with a minimum of only six members from two factions. "That was what we did at first," said Nixon. After the initiative was signed by six members, other parties were approached, with satisfactory results.

"There was even an ensuing impression that if any members of the legislative assembly or the executive body failed to support this proposal, they would be deemed conservative and their reputation as important figures would drop," Nixon said.

Meanwhile, Gusnar Ismail, the former municipality secretary and chairman of the regional planning agency, and now a deputy governor, said, while serving as a mediator between non- governmental organizations and the legislative and executive bodies, that mayors and executive officials in general needed support to boost Gorontalo. This support is necessary, he noted, especially considering that the locals rejected the protracted construction of a market for the Gorontalo municipality during the New Order era.

"We allowed the legislative agency to table their initiative proposal in the hope that we would be able to better plan development," he said.

So, the wishes of the legislative and the executive agencies really match. Gusnar even expressed the hope that what happened at the municipality level would also occur at the provincial level.

Both Nixon Ahmad and Nurdin Mogoginta, who has replaced Gusnar as the regional secretary and chairman of the regional development planning agency for Gorontalo municipality, admitted the great difficulty in implementing these bylaws.

"We are not used to having a good filing system and don't have the necessary skills to communicate with the community. We need to learn more," Mogoginta said. He added that they would need more than six months as a transitional period for the enforcement of these bylaws. "We must really work hard," he noted.

That these bylaws are indeed very difficult to implement is implied in the regulation on city planning, which states that community-based development planning (P2BM) is based on dialog and persuasion -- alien features under the New Order era. This is done through workshops, starting from the subdistrict and moving upward to the municipality level.

All regional heads concerned -- subdistrict heads, district heads or mayors -- are responsible for these workshops. The organization of these workshops must involve social groups referred to explicitly in the bylaws.

A supervisory body involving the public has been set up to ensure that the community-based development process takes place. Plans can be rejected if found to be not in accord with this process and regional heads face sanctions depending on the severity of the mistake.

"Practically, the administration at all levels cannot do any planning without involving the public, and this planning cannot be top-down in nature," Nixon said.

As for the bylaw on transparency, the administration will be obligated to actively provide information -- requested or otherwise -- about policies concerning the public. The party providing the information will not have the right to inquire about the intention and purpose of the information seeker.

Supervision of the administration involves superiors, legislators and the public.

As the regulations are quite clear, it is expected that locally generated revenue will not be leaked to officials and the powers-that-be.

Hopefully, more small worthy lessons in local governance are to be found elsewhere amid the confusion over regional autonomy.