The public appears to recognize him more for his controversial behavior than his achievements as a Cabinet minister.

One example of this came in June 2010 at the height of the controversy surrounding the sex video scandal of Peter Pan frontman Ariel, when Tifatul “accidentally” equated the debate of the resemblance of the images in the video to the historical-religious debate between Muslims and Christians about Jesus.

In November 2010, after his long-standing public claims of being a good Muslim man who restricts himself from touching women, he “accidentally” shook, not to mention with enthusiasm, the hand of US First Lady Michelle Obama.

Despite that his struggle to present himself with a more political image of public morality over substance has born little if any fruit, the minister is still not giving up.

He started the year 2011 with yet another controversy by threatening to block BlackBerry Internet browsing services in Indonesia by the end of January over a claim that Research In Motion (RIM), the company who invented and sells the telecommunication services, had not done enough to block access to porn sites.

Only, as with his previous controversies, this time Tifatul has also tried to defend his stance, following public outcries, by providing a clarification that again shows his wishy washy attitude as a public official.
After failing to convince the public with his morality argument, he defended his move with a nationalistic line.

Minister Tifatul provided an eight-point argument, which included jobs creation, improvement of local services, and tracking of corrupt people.

As with any other user of these so-called smartphones, I subscribe to this service because of its convenient features of providing instant messaging and push mail and allowing real-time access to long text communication with other users across the globe, at a very low cost.

While it is true that the device can show video images, including pornographic content, it is just hard to imagine that average users like me would have the time to “enjoy” such content while using this device at work.

The minister should be careful in using this argument as it may suggest that state officials like him do have a fair bit of free time to watch porn videos on their BlackBerry devices.

As a true Indonesian and a nationalist, I would love to have a smartphone called Durian or Rambutan, made entirely in Indonesia by our engineers and that runs from a server in Indonesia (although I would be concerned with the latter since we often have power shortages).

Minister Tifatul and his office should devote their energy and the public funds that we entrust upon them to provide training to our engineers and to encourage national hardware and software developers to compete and produce better and cheaper services.

So far, the second-hand cell phone store and my cellular provider are doing just fine maintaining the
services of my BlackBerry device, even without a local service center and server.

Last but not least, the argument of establishing a server/repeater in Indonesia to track the corrupt certainly constitutes a long-shot considering that detained corruption suspect Gayus H. Tambunan, aka Sony Laksono, was able to roam freely in Macau, Malaysia and Singapore, thanks to Indonesia’s special invention called the original-but-fake document.

Again, Minister Tifatul and his office should use their energy to create online immigration servers and computers that work, a service that the joint automatic teller machines (ATM Bersama) inventors, who are all Indonesian engineers, were able to successfully provide a long time ago.

There are many good Indonesian scientists and engineers who have made great inventions and products that are globally competitive without having to resort to phony nationalism (i.e., protectionism), much less resort to false grounds of morality. Well Mr. Minister, if they can spend their time producing something useful, why can’t you? Enough is enough!


The writer teaches regional development studies at the University of Indonesia and the Bogor Institute of Agriculture.

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