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Restructuring President's support system
Today, this effective support system has become the missing link to realizing administrative and bureaucratic simplification in the Presidential Office.
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President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo (fourth left) introduces his new presidential expert staff at Merdeka Palace in Jakarta on Nov. 21, 2019. (JP/Seto Wardhana)
P
ower implicitly resides in the President as both the head of state and the head of government, according the 1945 Constitution. However, his powers are now expanding and this consequently opens many doors to the President. This situation and the apparently ineffective leadership recently garnered more scrutiny after one of the millennials on the Presidential Special Staff wrote and sent a letter dated April 1 using the letterhead of the Cabinet Secretariat.
The letter, numbered 003/S-SKP-ATGP/IV/2020, is addressed to district and village administrations throughout the country and asks them to support a company’s COVID-19 countermeasure program. Further problems arose when it emerged that the special staffer who issued the letter reportedly heads the company in question.
These events were notable in that they showed ineffective leadership of the ever-expanding and complex bureaucracy in the circle closes to the President. In hindsight, this is a good opportunity to streamline the bureaucracy in the Presidential Office.
According to Koerniatmanto (2018), the Governor-General’s Office was a very strong institution in the Dutch East Indies era, run by a well-ordered administration under effective leadership. The Governor-General’s Office was managed effectively by a single agency headed by the secretary-general called Algemene Secretarie (General Secretariat). In principle, the General Secretariat functioned to assist the Governor-General and keep him informed. In essence, the institution ran the Governor-General’s Office and evolved as a supra-bureaucratic department in the colonial government established by the Dutch East India Company (VOC).
