National assets to pay debts?

JAKARTA (JP): Bank Indonesia, the central bank, has announced that the country's total foreign debt amounted to US$118 billion as of September last year. The government was responding to media speculation about the actual size of the debt, alleged to be about $200 billion.

But this official figure does not include the standby loan from the International Monetary Fund, amounting up to $40 billion.

Let us assume the government would not make use of the IMF's standby loan -- and thus no interest would be paid -- in order to create a scenario in which the amount of the foreign debt would not move from the officially stated figure. Also, let us operate under the assumption that Indonesia's total population would not increase drastically. After all family planning programs have substantially reduced population growth.

How much would each Indonesian owe?

The total population is now just over 200 million, including the elderly and newborns. This means that, like it or not, every Indonesian's share of the foreign debt of $118 billion is $590. This, of course, is the lowest and most optimistic figure.

The most pessimistic would add the IMF's standby loan to the $118 billion, making a total of about $170 billion. This calculation would mean $850 in debt for each and every citizen.

Before the economic crash, estimates put per capita income at about $1,500. With the plunge in the rupiah, causing a devaluation of around 119 percent, this figure is now probably around $800.

Which leads us to a surprising conclusion: per capita income is now probably almost equal to per capita foreign debt. In a deteriorating economy in which many business conglomerates cannot pay their debts in their entirety, this is a gloomy statistic indeed.

How could we possibly pay our debts?

Here's an idea. Maybe Brunei Darussalam, the richest country in the world, is interested in buying Kalimantan.

The people in Kalimantan could then choose to be new citizens under their new master, or remain Indonesians. The second choice would be to make them to move to other islands. If they preferred to maintain their Indonesian citizenship but chose to stay in Kalimantan, they would need to have passports.

But there is reasonable doubt that, after last year's catastrophic forest fires, Kalimantan's natural wealth is still intact and whether its value would be equivalent to the foreign debt amount. The incredible estimates about gold at Busang have proved to be nothing but lies. Its once bountiful logging enterprise has long been on the wane since forests are now as rare as comets.

But perhaps Brunei would be interested in making Kalimantan into the largest golf course in the world. They won't need to clear the forests, and Kalimantan's flat landscape offers an ideal area for a huge golf course.

If selling Kalimantan is not sufficient to pay all the debts, we can think about selling Sumatra to Singapore, with similar conditions as for Kalimantan. But the problems would be more complex here since the population is greater than in Kalimantan. Sumatra's rugged landscape and natural conditions would also make it more difficult to design the island as a golf course.

A proponent of the rational choice theory would hastily agree that the options of selling Kalimantan and Sumatra were indeed good suggestions. But I don't want to insult my compatriots living on those islands by putting their lands up for sale. What if they had a similar idea of selling Java, my island of origin?

But if we can't pay the debts and we can't sell one of our islands, then what? Maybe the only one other option is "go to hell with our debts!" Or what other suggestions are there to extricate us from this problem?

-- Hermawan Sulistyo