Procrastination: Hoping problems will just go away

Nirwan Idrus, Executive Director, Indonesian Institute for Management Development, Jakarta

The ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) 2003 wasn't to be, because it started on Jan. 1 2002 -- a year earlier. The Gulf Corporation Committee (GCC) also announced that their cut-in date has been moved forward from 2005 to 2003. The speed of the computer and the half-life of technology keeps moving forward, while we in Indonesia are asking for things to be moved backward!

As reported on Feb. 1, President Megawati Soekarnoputri at an AFTA Conference the previous day strongly suggested dispensation from the rules of AFTA for those countries which are still too weak to compete. A year or so ago, the Chairman of the Indonesian Automotive Association, asked for the postponement of AFTA 2003 by 10 years, as the Indonesian Automotive industry was not ready to compete.

The recent rift between Kwik Kian Gie and his cabinet peers and perhaps even the President herself, arose due to the postponement by 10 years no less of the debt repayment by conglomerates to the government. Obviously these debtors are also not ready to pay their debts, even though most of them are still living a life that most Indonesians can only view in television dramas, the sinetron.

There are many other examples of procrastination. The suffering by Jakartans in recent days due to floods is but just another. Regrettably, we cannot ask God to delay the rains until we have finished what we were supposed to have done many moons ago.

The monetary crisis is still with us while Thailand, Korea and other Asian countries have well passed it. People could not be blamed for thinking that we are so used to it now, that it may as well continue. We have survived for nearly 60 years since independence the way we are. Indonesians survived the Dutch colonization for 350 years presumably under worse conditions, so we can survive another 10 or 20 with the monetary crisis hanging over us. Why worry?

Well, Indonesia is already behind Vietnam in education. Vietnam, which had to bear the aftermaths of their civil war, which had to reform and revolutionize all sorts of things including education, will rapidly become an economic power in their own right. Observers expect Vietnam to surpass some of the other Asian economies in the next 10 to 15 years. This could in fact be time on the outside, as it may happen much earlier than that. Why could this happen?

Well, Vietnam's leadership is certainly one factor. There is a concerted effort to get the country going again. To some extent it has practiced AFTA and globalization earlier than some of the other Southeast Asian countries. Although recent times have reduced the speed of investments by other Asian countries in Vietnam, there is no doubt that they will continue.

There are also other investments -- in particular in their human resources and human resource capabilities. You only need to go to any one of the universities in Hanoi for the manifestation of the hunger for education. No, you won't see cars or even motorcycles in the campus' parking area. You see thousands of bicycles.

But go inside the university and you will see French, American professors, and Australian professors and so on involved in various educational programs with their Vietnamese counterparts. Programs that really work and that are running. Human resources and therefore education and training are absolute imperatives for the survival of a country.

Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore knew this right from the start. Maybe he didn't tell us the whole story. We can see now, that it wasn't just because Singapore didn't have any natural resources, but that the only way to progress is indeed through "knowledge economy" and a well educated citizenry.

Somebody once said that to think is to change. As a corollary, if there is no change then there is no thinking. One wonders if this befits Indonesia and Indonesians? One only has to be on the road for a few minutes in any city in Indonesia to confirm this.

It's a dangerous jungle out there on the streets. This is just the traffic -- not the other unthinkable activities that go on like bags snatching, extortion at traffic lights, pocket picking in buses and trains and even plain robbery. We all know why these happened, don't we?

We all say that there is no law enforcement and we read that the three most corrupt departments in the bureaucracy are the police, the judiciary and the customs -- the very departments that should become pillars of civilization.

Surely the people who are suffering most from the floods, the little people, do not have either the power or the tools to implement changes in those departments. In the armed forces you must blame the generals, not the foot soldiers, for losing a battle. The soldiers only follow orders.

Management gurus say that it is the managers who must be responsible for any action or inaction or for the quality or lack of quality in an organization.

All the above are only symptoms of what we all know to be chronic and cancerous problems in this country. Of course one can debate what the problems really are. One at least, must be procrastination by the governments and the people in government to take the difficult but appropriate decisions. It would seem that they are hoping hard that these problems will go away by themselves.

So delay the decisions, ask for extensions, find lots of reasons and spend lots of effort and money to justify procrastination, instead of spending that same effort to make and implement decisions.

After all, what are we going to get by waiting 10 years, by getting dispensation from rules that were made together with the other ASEAN countries and by not rocking the boat? Twenty more percent of Indonesians going below the poverty line, making it now 60 percent of the population, that's what!

Should we wait until 80 or 90 percent or about 200 million people, when Indonesia will indeed become a barbaric jungle and the only law is the survival of the strongest or fittest? It seems that then it will be really too late. Even now, intelligence reports are foreshadowing social unrests if the delays in debt repayment by the super-debtors were approved by the government.

At a recent conference on economic reform in Indonesia, someone commented that it is important that Indonesia has a blueprint for its survival and that it must ask the question: What sort of an Indonesian do we want to have in the year 2100?

A young official from a department that advises the presidential office, responded by dismissing the blueprint and said that the answer is already in the Constitution.

"We want a just and prosperous community," he said. But Indonesia has been trying just that for almost 60 years without success. You need a blueprint, mate!

And when should we start? The answer is of course now. And when is a good time for AFTA? Well everybody else around the region knows that it started on Jan. 1, 2002!