Megawati's bargaining position
The invitation from the House of Representatives to the two presidential candidates who will go on to the second round of the presidential election on Sept. 20 to present their likely Cabinet formations should they win the election (Kompas, July 15) is worth responding to.
Incumbent President Megawati Soekarnoputri, who looks to be the second candidate to qualify for the second round of the election, has the best chance to present her probable Cabinet lineup to law makers. Being the incumbent President and having ruled the country for more than three years, she has to come up with new and fresh proposals, especially as she has said on many occasions that she inherited a "bloated and rubbish bin bureaucracy". Meaning she has to come up with a slim and efficient Cabinet, unlike the 31 ministers in the next Cabinet recently proposed by the House (The Jakarta Post, July 15).
She also has to take this opportunity to leave behind the strategy-follows-structure paradigm, meaning that her predecessors set up the organizations first and their strategies followed later. This had led to a proliferation of government agencies and is completely contrary to Robbins and Millet's theory of structure-follows-strategy, as presented in their book Organizational Behavior (2002).
She also has to tell law makers that such a paradigm shift, which entails cost minimization, would save a lot of money needed for other crucial and urgent government programs such as poverty alleviation, job creation, environmental and energy conservation, etc.
In fact, the House's proposal is one minister more than Megawati's current Cabinet, something that flies in the face of her own ideas on restructuring and reforming the bureaucracy, which has been called for since the reform movement began in 1998. Critics of the bureaucracy say it is unproductive, swollen and ineffectual, which has led to rampant corruption at all levels of government.
If the public accepted Megawati's proposed Cabinet, it would help improve her popularity among voters. M. RUSDI Jakarta