Warning to Abdurrahman

Whatever thoughts President Abdurrahman Wahid entertained in having his international advisers parade to his office over the weekend, one thing was glaringly apparent. The show outstandingly failed to deliver what we reckoned to be his most important objective -- bolstering public confidence in his leadership, which has been dogged by the issuing of the legislature's memorandum of censure earlier this month.

Judging from the summary statement given by the four foreign advisers after a few hours of talks with the President and Indonesian economics ministers, it was clearly evident that the advisory panel did not even bother to talk subtly in delivering their assessment and blunt recommendations.

The advisers, consisting of Singapore's Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, former senior Japanese diplomat Nobuo Matsunaga and a former executive of the German central bank Ulrich Cartellieri, did not mince words in describing the formidable challenges facing the Abdurrahman administration, warning of the vulnerabilities of the budding recovery.

They told the government to mend its relationship with the International Monetary Fund, the leader of Indonesia's economic bailout program since November 1997, accelerate the reform measures and put the political uncertainty to an end in a bid to restore investor confidence in the future of the crisis-hit country.

They warned against premature complacency over last year's almost 5 percent growth, pointing out that the main locomotives for the 2000 economic recovery -- robust U.S. growth and the oil market boom -- would most likely slow down this year.

Nothing actually is new in the advice prescribed by the international advisers. Their recommendations only served to validate what has repeatedly been said by most politicians and domestic analysts over the last few months. But instead of accepting the recommendations as well-intentioned advice, chief economics minister Rizal Ramli seemed to have been irritated, treating the criticism mostly as being part of a smear campaign to discredit the government.

Rizal often flaunts last year's economic recovery to support his claim that everything is on the right track in so far as the government reform policy is concerned. He seems so overtly buoyed by the economic pickup last year that he tends to brush aside the IMF's postponement of its loan disbursement simply as a petty annoyance. Being a foreign-trained analyst, he seems too clever not to realize that the postponement means much more than a deferred cash injection, namely an international vote of no confidence in the government's willingness and capability to implement the reform measures already agreed on. Whether we like it or not, the IMF is now the only credible international judge of Indonesia's economic outlook.

What makes things even murkier is that Abdurrahman, the first democratically elected president of the country, who is supposed to be a canny politician, instead of acting quickly to capitalize on his political support to push through painful reform measures, rapidly squandered his popular legitimacy. He even caused political uncertainty by choosing to pick on the House of Representatives for meaningless bickering at a time when the government badly needs the full cooperation of the legislative body to implement the reform measures that are sorely required to remove the causes that brought about the multidimensional crisis the nation is now mired in.

With or without a "pushy" IMF, as Rizal last week described the oversight conducted by the multilateral agency, the government must implement the bank, corporate, judicial and administrative reform measures that make up the essence of the government's letter of intent with the IMF. Without these measures, the nation will never get out of its deep crisis.

Immediately after his appointment to the Cabinet last August, Rizal immediately drafted a new reform agreement with the IMF simply to demonstrate that the reform measures were formulated and determined by his economic team in Abdurrahman's new (second) Cabinet. But now, when many reform policies have fallen behind schedule and, more worrisome, some of them are in danger of being reversed, the government cannot simply put the blame on the IMF.

The blunt warning from Abdurrahman's international advisers should jolt the government into acting in a firmer and speedier manner so as to implement the reform agenda. Otherwise, the economy will plunge into an abyss with more devastating political and social repercussions than those experienced by the nation in 1998.