I

f you'€™re in Jakarta, chances are you'€™ve recently been held up due to rain, stuck in traffic when braving a downpour or trapped in a flooded area.

Some lucky Jakartans have experienced all four.

Just as luckily, the city'€™s wired who go on social media to question, discuss or vent have been immediately presented with two thin options by the increasingly polarized Internet: Either the new gubernatorial duo of Jokowi and Ahok has done its best or has failed at the worst.

Pick one and the other camp would mob you. Try to be objective, both camps would lynch you. Been there, suffered that.

Flood problems are never one-dimensional. It doesn'€™t take an expert to see that Jakarta'€™s drainage and sewage systems are narrow, shallow, disjointed and often inadequate for the volume of water passing through the neighborhood.

To make it worse, sewers are often clogged by trash or covered by concrete slabs to make parking spaces '€” a common sight in previously residential areas turned commercial, such as Kebayoran Baru and Kemang.

When water comes pouring in during the rainy season, it easily fills the inadequate sewers and has nowhere to go to but the street.

It then gets really ugly because it will meet the lovechild of the city'€™s poorly disjointed mass transportation system and its residents'€™ rising incomes, i.e., a massive amount of private vehicles.

Clogged sewers, clogged streets, clogged arteries of our very distressed bodies. Realize how people have started to die in their thirties now? Jakarta has become inhospitable to its very inhabitants.

Now, what has the new city'€™s new executive team done to improve our living standards? For starters, the duo has put into effect a few policies to better manage Tanah Abang, banish illegal parking in certain downtown spots, return busway lanes fully to Transjakarta buses and to reform the bureaucracy under their command.

The duo was lucky to start after the long preparatory stages for the mass rapid transit (MRT) and canal cleaning programs that, let'€™s be honest, were initiated and budgeted by the previous governor.

Is it reasonable to expect Jokowi and Ahok to fix floods and traffic problems overnight? Absolutely not. Have residents shown their appreciation for the early efforts done? In different ways, mostly yes. Are Jakartans eligible to question, criticize and demand more of their elected leaders 15 months and two rainy seasons into their 5-year term? Democratically, resoundingly yes.

Isn'€™t accountability to constituents an integral part of democracy?

Beyond the extreme first-100-day reviews, there'€™s the more common annual performance reviews. The bad thing about Indonesian bureaucracy is there are no explicit, quantified and time-tabled personal goals for public servants to link to rewards and punishments '€” something that corporate employees have been measured against for decades '€” so everyone gets subjective and easily polarized into all-positive worshippers or all-negative haters.

Yet the debate would have probably been less polarized if only this wasn'€™t a presidential election year.

Jokowi'€™s well-documented achievements as mayor of Surakarta (population about 1 million) and early efforts in Jakarta has made him a freshly-scrubbed darling for the presidential bourse that'€™s so far dotted with old faces and their baggage, even if Jokowi himself never announced his intention to run.

Factions are vying for him to be on their tickets to the point that they get flamingly hostile when a critique, no matter what the source and however objectively justified, is addressed to Jokowi '€” in stark contrast to Jokowi'€™s famed friendly demeanor.

 On social media, some may even call you names or accuse you of taking bribes '€” as if one can'€™t tell the difference between professional (negative) buzzers and random citizens mustering enough intelligence to provide feedback.

This is insulting at best, damaging to Jokowi'€™s own long-term leadership at worst.

I value leaders'€™ commitments more than their smiles. After all, we elect them to lead and execute, not to be our tea-party guests. I think Jokowi and Ahok must step on the gear much faster, and step on some toes if they must, to really turn around this poorly managed metropolis in the next three-and-half-years.

New rules may not be needed as much as upholding the current rules for any citizen, even at the risk of accusations of not favoring '€œthe little people'€ '€” political capital that the duo has been banking on since the beginning '€” or irking the elite for not turning the other cheek.

Elected leaders must serve a full term in office to fulfill campaign promises, especially if the situation is this dire, before I could even think of voting them into a higher office.

For those who argued that Jokowi could still '€œreform'€ Greater Jakarta (population around 15 million) from the Presidential Palace, how colossally egoistical.

How could the elected president of 230 million or so citizens still be absorbed by our monumental problems just because we house his office? Indonesia stretches so far beyond Jakarta and your narrow attention span or political gain, just in case you forgot.

To Jokowi and Ahok: soldier on in Jakarta, much faster and more decisively. Deliver on your campaign pledges, like honorable adults do.

To Indonesians, Jokowi and Ahok already have full-time jobs, so we need to keep searching elsewhere for presidential candidates '€” however grim these early prospects are because, fellow citizens, that would be the honorable and adult thing for us to do.

Lynda Ibrahim is a Jakarta-based writer and consultant, with a penchant for purple, pussycats and pop culture.