Procrastination: Hoping problems will just go away

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!