Election paraphernalia enlivens Pasar Senen
Zakki Hakim, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
A burst of color is lending an air of festivity to Senen market in Central Jakarta these days. They are the colors of the attributes of political parties, which are gearing up for the 2004 general election.
The fiesta of democracy, as the New Order regime used to call the general elections, is still 10 months away. However, tons of orders have already begun inundating the shop owners that produce all kinds of uniforms and attributes in Senen market.
Almost every shop in Blok III is filled with piles of blazers, suits, vests, shirts, hats, banners and flags in red, yellow, green, blue and white.
Denny, 31, is currently working on an order of 144 vests for a political party for shipment later this month to Deli, North Sumatra.
"A middleman usually places orders with us. It is rare for a representative of a political party to directly order attributes," he told The Jakarta Post last week.
He said that middlemen usually paid 30 percent of the total price as a down payment, and then offered their stock to the political parties.
Such a process, however, at times ends with the middlemen never showing up again, leaving big piles of attributes in his shop, apparently because they have failed to find a buyer.
Denny showed the Post his leftover stock from the last general election in 1999.
"Anyway, we can still sell these attributes because most of my stock is for the main political parties, who will definitely run in the elections again next year," he said.
Learning from the 1999 general election, he now imposes a 50 percent down payment as a main condition before he will accept an order.
He also tries to approach political parties directly, because middlemen profit the most by charging high prices to the political parties and bargaining the price down with attribute producers.
"Through middlemen we can get only a profit of about 3 percent for each item, while a direct order from a political party enables us to earn a 30 percent profit on the total order," he said.
As an example, he once personally approached a central board of a big party and ended up with a Rp 35 million (approximately US$4,300) order.
"The profit is bigger and more secure," he said.
Salman, 35, another producer in Senen market, said, however, that orders from middlemen still dominated the market because getting orders directly from political parties was not easy.
"Although the middlemen take advantage of us, they are the ones who make the market go round. We just have to be more careful," he said.
Middlemen usually order a great number of attributes and spread jobs all over the market. Otherwise it is the producers themselves who distribute the work among them.
"A hundred here, a hundred there, just like that," he said.
Middlemen, through their orders, are already adding hype to the upcoming general election and it looks as if the people in Senen market are having a fiesta of their own -- a head start on their fellow Indonesians.