State Policy Guidelines

State Policy Guidelines

The 1998/2003 State Policy Guidelines which the People's
Consultative Assembly (MPR) will enact at the end of its current
General Session are essentially more important than the question
of who will be the president and vice president. The State Policy
Guidelines (GBHN) set out the policy framework for the new
president to carry out in the next five years. This document
determines the fate of the nation much more so than the president
who is given the mandate to carry it out. While leadership is
crucial in state affairs, its success is only as good as the
policy he or she carries out.

Given its importance, it is sad to see that the GBHN has
received scant attention from the 1,000 MPR members, who seem to
prefer to indulge in irrelevance, such as in speculating about
the formation of the next cabinet. Part of the reason, we
believe, is that the question of the GBHN, like that of the
president and vice president, was determined even before the
General Session began. The GBHN draft has been debated by the
Assembly's preparatory working committee from November to
January, and the current session will simply be used to fine tune
the document.

The GBHN draft originated from a concept drawn up by Golkar,
the dominant political faction in the Assembly. Given its
majority position, and with the backing of the Armed Forces and
the regional representatives factions, the draft underwent minor
changes at the working committee level. The United Development
Party and the Indonesian Democratic Party, for example, were
steamrolled by the dominant factions when they demanded basic
political reforms, including changes to the electoral system.

With all due respect to the working committee members who put
a lot of hours and resources into debating the GBHN, we fear that
the document has failed to take into account the deep economic
crisis into which this nation has plunged. When the working
committee wound up its meeting in January, the crisis had only
just started to rear its ugly head. At the time, most people
expected the crisis to be temporary. Few, including the MPR
members, anticipated that it would intensify.

It is now widely accepted that the crisis has exposed deep
fundamental and structural problems in our country, which the
GBHN, at least in its present draft, is not likely to remedy.

The five MPR factions for example have recognized that
corruption, collusion, monopoly and nepotism are so deeply rooted
in our nation that they obstruct any move toward clean government
and good governance. These, many believe, are the chief reasons
why the nation has failed to lift itself out of the crisis. But
if we recall, these issues were already recognized in the 1993
MPR session, although the terms "clean government" and "good
governance" were not used. Recognizing the problems is one thing,
and recognizing their reasons is another. Taking remedial action
is altogether a whole different ball game.

The outgoing government has failed in its battle against
corruption, collusion, monopoly and nepotism, as demanded in the
1993 GBHN, not so much because of its inability, but because of
structural imbalances in the state institutions. The legislative
and judicial branches have been virtually powerless against the
overriding power of the executive branch. They are dysfunctional
institutions when it comes to providing checks and balances
against the executive branch, where the practices of corruption,
collusion, monopoly and nepotism are most prevalent.

This structural imbalance, unfortunately, is not addressed in
the new GBHN in its present format. On the contrary, the MPR is
about to give even greater powers to the new president, a move
that is likely to make the House of Representatives and the
courts of law even more subservient to the executive branch.

The future of this nation for the next five years hangs in the
GBHN. The 1,000 MPR members, not the new president, will be
responsible for much of what will happen to this nation in the
coming years. They can enact a GBHN that will essentially give
more of the same policies of these past five years, but whose
effectiveness have become very doubtful given the current
economic crisis. Or they can give a new GBHN that truly deals
with the problems the nation is facing, one that requires a major
overhaul of the way state institutions have been run.