In search of better national leaders

In search of better national leaders

By Iwan Mucipto

JAKARTA (JP): This article is a response to Mochtar Buchori's
piece (The Jakarta Post, March 26, 1998) about the low quality of
our present political leadership which he sees as a result of our
deteriorating educational system.

In his view, as an educator, the solution to the problem is
just to improve the system and voila, it will produce better
leaders.

Of course he is right, but I have three objections, not to his
proposed solution but to his priorities.

First, who will improve the system, our political leadership?

We know the complaints, the impact of the political
superstructure on the national educational system that steadily
keeps burdening the curriculum with more and more indoctrination,
burdening the teachers with more and more "administrative costs".

This is done while everybody is expected to cheerfully follow
a zigzag course since every new cabinet has a new minister of
education who insists that his views and policies replace his
predecessors views and policies.

What initiative can we expect from that side?

Second, how does one improve the educational system on short
notice before the present leadership has run the ship of state
aground?

An overhaul of our educational system is a long-term project.
Without being sarcastic, I would like to see this country become
democratic soon and see Buchori advocated by a real political
party to become minister of education based upon his view point,
not because he is a loyalist. But this is wishful thinking,
democracy will come but not soon.

Third, formal education is not the most important requirement
for political leadership. History is abound with great leaders
who did not happen to graduate from military academies or elite
universities. Although, of course, officers and university
graduates are not excluded.

(Good) leadership is a matter of vision, integrity, will
power, social skills, social grace and others.

If a good leader emerges, well-educated experts will follow.
But where to find people who have these characteristics?

They are with us all the time, it just takes courage to
acknowledge them, and now is the time to find them, particularly
while students are demonstrating and organizing after the long
silence imposed on them after former education minister Daud
Jusuf's "campus normalization concept".

In 1977, student leaders of the student councils and senates
of Bandung united to launch the Movement Against Ignorance to
fight what they perceived as the "stupidization of the people",
and the government's failure to give first priority to education
in order to endorse the ideal stated in the preamble of the
Constitution, that independence entails enlightenment of the
people.

The students made Prof. Slamet Iman Santoso, the grand old man
of education in Indonesia, their hero, and through peaceful
advocacy campaigned for a national program of education for the
masses.

The movement had a political ring to it, the students were
dissatisfied with the same old issues being protested by
students, but they didn't want confrontation.

Like Buchori, they blamed the evils in society on the absence
of an adequate system of national education, in and out of
schools. They wanted a dialog, to initiate a discourse, and they
went to meet the factions' members in the House of
Representatives.

The House should have reacted and made the issue its own
working agenda. It did not happen. The leading faction refused to
meet the students. The then minister of education, Syarif Thayeb
scorned the students as amateurs. The then security chief, Adm.
Sudomo, warned against "practical politics".

The questions were, as always, "Who is behind it? Who is using
the students to undermine the government and in what way?"

In the end the students became frustrated, radicalized and
started to take to the streets. Then the government finally knew
how to respond -- clobber them.

In the end the new minister of education disbanded all forms
of independent student bodies and made the university rectors
responsible for their students "good" (political) behavior.

The next weapon wielded was telling the students that they
should study and not play political games on campus.

A number of determined activists joined an NGO movement, which
in due time was hemmed in again by restrictive regulations,
steering the movement toward a "developmentalist" course where
projects, not politics and funding, nor social transformation,
became the leading issues.

Activism too failed to become an alternative ground for
education, in the sense of "character building", one of late
president Sukarno's hobby horses.

The "normalization" of the campuses is a national tragedy, it
taught a whole generation of university graduates not to think
critically about their people and country and not to govern
themselves.

It just prepared them to be a good "native elite", join the
technostructure of society, and steal oneself to riches. Why?
Because the government, if it sees natural leaders emerge who
have the integrity to care and take agency, reacts as though to
jump on them with all four feet.

Our officialdom, whose values dominate civil society, just
cannot face a new generation of leaders who are trying to build
their own conceptual and political platform to adequately prepare
for the future.

Instead, cadre recruitment and formation (kaderisasi) is the
word, and lo and behold, how many billions are spend on the
congresses of tame youth organizations where the issue is always,
who is the one the government favors to be elected as the new
chairman?

The issue is never "education", or "the environment", or any
other strategic issue. That is up to the government to decide and
a cadre just follows. Speaking of transformation or reformation
at such a congress is of course akin to heresy.

Then, once an university graduate of successful cadre enters
society, he or she is soon learning to adjust to the culture of
corruption, collusion and nepotism. You want to be hired (or
admitted)? "Whose relative are you? How much can you pay?" And
once incorporated into the structure: "Are you willing to
collaborate?"

I am not making these things up, I have been there, working
with various government agencies on a number of development
projects in a dozen provinces on all levels.

There is no meritocracy but a kleptocracy going on, selection
for leadership is negative. It is just like they say about
economics: bad money drives out good money, it is the same in the
political bureaucracy: bad officers and employees drive out the
good ones, or keep them down.

Like my former boss told me: The first lesson is, don't look
too good. The second, don't rock the boat. The third, write good
reports.

In other words, don't be good, collaborate and lie. Then
you'll make it. So where should our political leaders come from?
The universities?

Presently, thank God, students are staring and shaking off
their mental shackles. They may cause mayhem, but they promise to
become concerned leaders.

The government should know that they are not its enemies but
our future leaders. We need people who care, have a vision, who
have courage and are willing to take risks to speak out and share
their vision.

The House should understand that the party is over, start
talking to the people, listen to the students, share their
concerns, carry on their cares.

Look at the crisis we are now facing, it turns out that the
people we have trusted as our leaders are good weather sailors
used to taking instructions and accepting the given course on
face value.

Now that we are in stormy weather, nobody seems to be able to
take the initiative. We have to be dictated to by the
International Monetary Fund, lectured by economist Prof. Steve
Hanke, saved by the Japanese, defended by the Australians. Do we
have any political leadership at all, or do we have a pied piper
who lost his flute?

Our new vice president sure is brainy and he is right to say
that hi-tech is important to our future. But plants can be bought
and technology consumed -- the crucial question is: when will we
have real entrepreneurs?

Or leaders with a vision, captains of industry, computer
whizzes, great scientists and artists, inventors, activists and
innovators? Leaders in their field? The answer is: when the minds
of the young are unshackled, their initiative freed.

I appeal to Pak Habibie: don't keep your trust in followers,
cadres. The tamed and the depoliticized, the apathetic. They can
be put under the yoke and driven over any field, but they will
not carry the future.

Instead, put your trust in the wild young colts who run and
kick and come not cheap nor easy. However, if you give them your
trust, they will give you theirs. Then the future will be yours,
and the educational system will follow, if people like the
students who started the Movement Against Ignorance are put into
positions of responsibility instead of in jail.

Window A: The government should know that they are not its enemies
but our future leaders. We need people who care, have a vision,
who have courage and are willing to take risks to speak out and
share their vision.

Window B: Look at the crisis we are now facing, it turns out that
the people we have trusted as our leaders are good weather
sailors used to taking instructions and accepting the given
course on face value.