Regions blamed for strikes
JAKARTA (JP): As teachers' strikes continued to hit a number of areas of the country, local administrations were scrambling to find funds, including commercial loans if necessary, to pay the teachers' back pay.
On Thursday, thousands of teachers failed to show up for classes in Madiun regency, East Java, Muna regency, Southeast Sulawesi, and the town of Lampung, saying they would stay away until they received their six-months back pay.
In Lampung, the strike could spread to the entire province as teachers grouped in the Indonesian Teachers Dignity Forum (FMGI) are campaigning for a province-wide teachers' strike starting on Sept. 6.
The forum's chairman, Murni Sulaiman, said some 100,0000 strike pamphlets had been printed and these were being distributed to all 50,000 teachers in the province.
"Our various efforts (to get the back pay) have been futile. Therefore, we will launch an all-out strike," Murni said.
Nevertheless, striking teachers in Purbalingga regency, Central Java, resumed teaching again on Thursday after the local administration promised that they would borrow money from a local development bank to pay them their back pay soon.
The Muna administration will copy Purbalingga's way of dealing with the problem. It plans to borrow a total of Rp 8.5 billion (about US$955,000 million) from state-owned Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI) at an interest rate of 1.4 percent per month, or 18 percent per annum.
Muna Regent Ridwan said that the administration's move to take out a commercial loan to pay the teachers their back pay had been approved by the regency's legislative council.
"This is the best alternative ... so that we will be able to pay civil servants' their back pay," Ridwan told Antara.
Another alternative would be using development funds from the central government to pay the teachers' back pay, and seek bank loans to finance development projects.
However, the councillors decided that the administration should borrow money from banks and then ask for additional education funding from the central government to repay the loan.
Meanwhile in Jakarta, Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare Jusuf Kalla said that the central government had already disbursed the funds for the teachers' back pay through the General Allocation Fund (DAU), but that many regions had used them for other projects.
"Now we will demand that each regional administration be held accountable for what happens," the minister said, adding that local councils could pressure their local administrations to pay up.
"Local administrations could borrow some money from banks to fulfill their obligations," the minister added.
Meanwhile, education observers said that the back pay debacle and the ensuing teachers' strikes proved that the implementation of regional autonomy lacked sufficient preparation.
"There is a tendency for the central government to want to fully hand over responsibility to the local administrations, while the latter are apparently not yet prepared to assume the responsibility," Ace Suryadi, an education observer from the University of Indonesia told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.
Suryadi blamed the central government for the furor, saying that the government should not have entrusted all educational affairs, including budget management, to local administrations.
However, former education minister Fuad Hassan disagreed that the central government was to the one to blame, saying that the current mix-up over teachers' back pay was only a consequence of the complex decentralization process.
"This is only an example of problems in the implementation of regional autonomy." (DJA/02)