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.