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span class="caption" style="width: 378px;">President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and First Lady Ani Yudhoyono (JP/Abror Rizki)More advice or suggestions is the last thing President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono needs now, as he ponders reshuffling his Cabinet. He must have received more suggestions than he needed since publicly disclosing his intention to make changes in the lineup of his government by Oct. 20, when he will enter the third year of his current second term in office.

Like many others who are concerned or have vested interests in the future of Indonesia, I have my personal thoughts about what the Cabinet should look like, who to keep in and who to leave out in this upcoming reshuffle. But my opinion is just one of millions, so I will not bore you with them.

I do want to say, however, that Yudhoyono should seriously think about the kind of legacy he wants to leave after 2014. As the Constitution bars him from running again after serving for two-consecutive terms, he had better start thinking about his legacy now. More precisely, he should ask himself how he wants to be remembered by the nation after his departure, and how he wants historians to write about his presidency and his leadership throughout 2004-2014.

Would he be remembered as a great leader, or someone who was simply good, or even mediocre?

Since his 2009 reelection, we have not seen any indication that he has been seriously creating or building a legacy for himself that would have him remembered as a great president, despite the knowledge that he would have to leave the national political stage in 2014.

Instead, he has continued to pander to popular sentiment and is constantly polishing his image as if he was still seeking a third term. He even responds, at times publicly, to fluctuations in the opinion surveys highlighting his ever-declining approval ratings. With an approval rating set at 80 percent or higher in 2009, it was of course to be predicted that it would decline.

This is also a president who seems to be constantly beholden to the coalition government he has voluntarily formed, ceding some of his power to representatives from four other political parties besides his own Democratic Party. The rationale behind a coalition was that he needed the controlling majority in the House of Representatives in order to pass his own legislative agenda. That rationale must have gone out the window given the constant backstabbing by his coalition partners almost from the get-go.

His troubles seem to have started with the naming of his second National Unity Cabinet in 2009. He ended up with a Cabinet filled with more politicians than technocrats. Events since then have shown that this was a divisive government, far more divided than the first one he cobbled together in 2004.

His landslide victory in 2009 presented Yudhoyono with a historic opportunity with which to create his legacy as Indonesia’s sixth president, carve a niche — or even a chapter — in the nation’s history books, instead of disappearing into the footnotes very much like his three predecessors.

B.J. Habibie, Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati Soekarnoputri could be forgiven for not quite making their mark in the national history books because they each served less than three-and-half years. Yudhoyono will have served the full 10 years by the time he finishes his second term, and most people to this day still haven’t figured out what will be considered his greatest legacy that will set him apart from those three. Going by Yudhoyono’s own actions these past two years, it seems like the President isn’t sure himself.

For all their faults and shortcomings, Indonesia’s first two presidents, Sukarno and Soeharto, are widely recognized as truly great leaders. They had the advantage of time, serving 21 years and 32 years respectively, to change the course of history, even though both their terms in office ended tragically. Yudhoyono with his 10 years of service could match, or at least come close to, those two earlier presidents.

When Yudhoyono began his second term in office in 2009, he started with a speech setting out his grand vision for Indonesia through what he called the “second wave of reformation”, a period in which the process of reforms in political, economic and social fields would accelerate to deliver Indonesia onto a higher plane. He has since come up with a master plan for the acceleration of economic development to have Indonesia become one of the world’s 10-largest economies by 2025.

All these measures bode well for building his legacy, but they are concepts that have yet to be transformed into reality. And herein lies the problem: His Cabinet has not been all that supportive of his vision for Indonesia.

We rarely hear any of his ministers invoking the “second wave of reforms”. The term has not caught on nationally, either in academic circles, or in the media, to become a buzzword that should be part of his legacy, if it was seriously pursued and implemented.

Instead, many ministers have been busy with their own personal agendas, or worse, the agendas of the political parties they represent. Yudhoyono’s own Democratic Party is not exempt, as some of that party’s ministers are now embroiled in corruption investigations and family scandals.

Will three years be sufficient for Yudhoyono to build and create his legacy? That depends on whether he plays his cards right in reshuffling the Cabinet.

We wish the President well as he embarks on the final years of his presidency.

The writer is a visiting fellow at the East West Center in Washington and a senior editor with The Jakarta Post.