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Three years under Jokowi: Keeping the nose to the grindstone
We will see how some policies could have been better with a good design.
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President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo inaugurates a hanging bridge. (Courtesy of the Presidential Office/file)
I
n its third year, the Jokowi administration has achieved much. But there’s a lot of work left. What lessons have we learned, and how can we apply them to the remainder of the term?
Three years ago, I said that the new government should come up with a bold plan and action. Instead, we saw a burst of activity, all with good intentions. But some were not based on careful plans. So, there were some early setbacks.
General Patton said: “A good plan executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” But in the end, he did not win the war in Europe. That took the longer view of the less flashy General Eisenhower.
We will see how some policies could have been better with a good design.
Forced and unforced errors: This is an example of not being sensitive enough to changing circumstances. The new government made a bold move in late 2014 to cut the wasteful fuel subsidies. The savings funded infrastructure. But then oil prices tanked, wiping out those savings. The result was a severe shortfall in government revenues in 2015. In hindsight, oil prices were already weakening since 2013, when the United States Federal Reserve announced its upcoming rate hike. It was only a matter of time before commodity prices took a nosedive.
Next, is an example of underestimating bureaucratic sluggishness. One early policy was to slice and dice several ministries. As a result, these ministries were busy shuffling desks around for more than six months. Particularly impactful was the merging of the public housing and public works ministries: Only from the third quarter of 2015 were efforts in transportation infrastructure started.
In 2016, in the face of a tax revenue shortfall, an idea surfaced on how to enlarge the tax base, especially on how to bring home the assets Indonesians had stashed abroad. Later dubbed the tax amnesty, it was quite successful in alleviating some shortcomings. Taxpayers revealed assets with an unprecedented value close to 40 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), but less than one million taxpayers participated. And the repatriated amount was less than 15 percent of declared offshore assets.
