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.