Stop showing the absurd

For many local theater lovers who enjoy the absurd, they might feel it is no longer necessary to go to Europe for such a show because it is available here. The quality might not be there but the fee is reasonable, since it does not cost anything to watch. The whole country seems to have become a theater of the absurd.

For example, in Surakarta, the city administration ordered that all trees and street markers in the Central Java town be painted yellow, which it said was the symbolic color of the town.

However, since the order was made before the election, people suspected it was a covert campaign for the leading government faction, whose party color is also yellow. But authorities turned deaf ears to the protest and the show hilariously went on.

Earlier this month, Surabaya, the country's second largest city, was shocked by an order for primary school children to buy academic books with the pictures of the city mayor, his wife and the chairman of the local assembly on the cover. Mayor Sunarto Sumoprawiro later disassociated himself from the business saying he did not know anything about the book.

Besides the coercive way the book was distributed by a private company, school principals also complained the book cover "is ugly and the price is comparatively high". However, the book's distribution continued.

The question now is how could local authorities let such a personal cult of the mayor be channeled through education. They might have forgotten that this nation in the 1960s put the blame on the personal cult of founding president Sukarno for pushing the country deeper into chaos. Usually primary school book covers depict national symbols.

President Soeharto was reportedly upset by a scandal involving the Ministry of Education and Culture in 1991, but the case was only reported to him recently. The ministry ordered all junior and senior high schools all over Indonesia to use South Korean produced soccer balls because the producer won the tender bid run by the ministry.

But what was later revealed was that the balls were made in Majalengka, West Java, and later sent to South Korea to get the "Nassau" brand name. In local markets, the price of the ball was Rp 2,325 (85 U.S. cents) each, but after returning from the round-trip to South Korea it was raised to Rp 50,000, with the genuine manufacturer only receiving Rp 100 in profit for every ball he made.

The list of absurdities may be too long for this whole page if all examples are mentioned. But the latest example, which was reported by Kompas daily yesterday, is an item no reader should miss.

The same Ministry of Education and Culture, is said to be planning to have all primary school students throughout Indonesia wear uniform shoes produced by a certain private company.

The reason behind the measure might be to make the already existing dress uniform complete so that any remaining symbol of a social gap between students could be eliminated. But why support the hated policy of monopolies while the whole nation is fighting against it?

For the ministry, the monopolistic system seems to have become part of its national policy because it has also ordered all public schools to use only textbooks published by the state-owned publishing company, Balai Pustaka.

Regarding the absurdity of the policy, a member of the education commission of the House of Representatives reacted yesterday and called the "shoe uniform policy... foolish and highly unacceptable to healthy minds".

We sincerely hope the legislator's reaction serves as a reminder that it is high time now to end the show of the absurd before this country becomes a true comedic theater of errors.