Regional Autonomy Focus: Human resources hinder development in Wonosobo

Agus Maryono ,  The Jakarta Post ,  Wonosobo   |  Mon, 07/14/2008 10:08 AM  |  The Archipelago

Even with its promising land and a strategic location, Wonosobo, Central Java, has seen slow development due to the low quality of human resources and political heterogeneity, area politicians say.

The 58-year-old fertile, mountainous regency is surrounded by seven of the province's 35 regencies and supplies rich agriculture and tourism products to other provinces.

Its high rate of illiteracy and increasing number of poor families are anticipated to be main problems in the next decade unless education levels rise.

According to the regency administration, almost 90 percent of 780,000 people live in hilly areas and earn their livelihoods in agribusiness.

Some 36.8 percent live below the poverty line.

"A bigger part of the people make their livings in agriculture, with their low education backgrounds. They are usually graduates and dropouts of elementary school. Most parents cannot afford an expensive education and are still using old technologies in managing their farmland," Wonosobo Regent Kholiq Arif told The Jakarta Post at his office recently.

Kholiq said that with one year left in his tenure he was trying to implement regional autonomy at the village level.

"This fiscal year, the regency administration disburses Rp 200 million (US$21,700) to village allocation funds in each village to stimulate economic growth in rural areas. In all, 265 villages in 15 subdistricts have received the money."

He said, however, that many thought the money had yet to be used maximally to empower the villages' potential and many residents had remained reluctant to use the rotating funds because of their low education backgrounds.

"My goal is to empower farmers to develop the agribusiness to produce export commodities to help improve their income and the regency's internally generated revenue," he said.

The regency's internally generated revenue amounted to Rp 30 million in 2007 "and this is still far from enough to cover the regency's annual budget which this fiscal year is Rp 400 million. And if this condition continues, we will remain dependent on the allocations from the central government and the annual state budget," he said.

Kholiq, who was defeated in the recent Central Java gubernatorial race, said further that the internal conflict in the National Awakening Party (PKB) had divided area residents, mostly members and supporters of the largest Muslim organization Nadhlatul Ulama (NU).

"The people have been easily provoked by local NU clerics and party functionaries and this has indirectly influenced their compliance with the local administration's policies and bylaws," he said, adding that so far, only a few clerics had maintained their neutrality in the face of the party's conflict.

He warned the political partition would widen and spread because of the presence of NU-affiliated political parties contending the 2009 election, adding that he regretted village head elections and development projects had been influenced by the political division.

Kholiq, also a former journalist of the Jawa Pos daily in Surabaya, East Java, said he would allocate a bigger part of the regency's budget in the coming four years for education development, including the compulsory nine-year education program, free education for the poor and the alleviation of illiteracy.

"In the past year, the literacy program covered 95 percent of the illiterate people aged between 15 and 45 and the regency has been targeted to be completely alleviated this fiscal year," he said.

He said he was optimistic the political division would gradually narrow in line with the expected decrease in the number of political parties through natural selection.

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