Megawati's bargaining position

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