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f you like the theater, you may have seen Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a famous play that deals with attitudes toward man's experience on earth and the pathos, cruelty, comradeship, hope, corruption, filthiness and wonder of the human experience.

Beckett's play tells a story of the hopeless destiny of the human race, as depicted by four raffish characters, an innocent boy who twice arrives with a message from Godot, a naked tree and one or two mounds of earth.

Two of the characters, Estragon and Vladimir, are waiting for Godot, who never arrives. The other two are a flamboyant lord of the earth named Frodo, and his broken slave, Lucky, who whimpers and staggers with a rope around his neck.

Beckett uses his drama to portray the story of mankind's faith in salvation. Even at the end, Godot never comes, and the bewildered protagonists go on with their lives without knowing why they are still hoping to meet Godot.

The play provides a useful parallel to the controversy surrounding the new Indonesian civil service legislation over the last few weeks.

I recently received a text message from a friend, a former senior executive at the State Secretariat, which relayed a very discouraging message: 'The inner circle in President's executive office will plunge RUU ASN [the civil service bill] into the sea.'

Holding up this bill is a real threat to a country aspiring to be the seventh largest economy in the world by the middle of this century. Indonesia needs to work very hard in a very short time to develop a highly professional and dynamic national public service to lead the country.

This is in order to realize two digit economic growth, build national capacity to deliver quality public services for its close to 300 million population, and turn its 220 million-strong productive population into a demographic dividend before the country celebrates its centennial year.   

Around mid-July 2011, the House of Representatives approved an initiative to propose new legislation on the Indonesian civil service to replace Law No. 43/1999 on state employees.

The new legislation would define the Indonesian civil service as profession with basic norms, codes of conduct, specific competencies and requirements. The new legislation would also provide two employment statuses, civil servants and contractual government employees.

It would set up career leader services for senior executives in national and subnational agencies and establish an independent committee to formulate regulations for a meritocratic civil service and its implementation by agencies of national and subnational government.

The legislation would also introduce a single salary scheme and a defined contribution pension scheme for employees of the Indonesian civil service.

In short, the new law would prepare the Indonesian civil service to face many upcoming challenges.    

With an economic growth of 6 to 6.5 percent per annum sustained over 15 years, Indonesia is becoming a middle-income country.

A gross domestic product (GDP) of US$1,126 trillion in 2012 put Indonesia on the list of G-27 countries, and this during a period where many countries have struggled to avoid negative growth rates.

Although GDP growth in the first quarter of 2013 was lower than previous years, Indonesia's high economic growth continues to be the envy of many countries.

Last March, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) launched its 2013 human development report entitled The Rise of the South. After more than a century of domination by the North, the report describes the rebalancing of economic power between the North and the South, the rise in South-South trade and interconnectedness with spillover effects, and the rapidly growing middle-class in the South.  

The report places Asian countries at the forefront of the new Southern hemisphere.

It identifies more than 40 developing countries that have done better than expected in terms of human development in recent decades.

With their progress accelerating over the past 10 years, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey and other developing countries are becoming leading actors on the world stage, with China, India and Brazil outperforming other high performing countries.

The main drivers behind these fast-rising powers are: the existence of strong, proactive and responsible states, fully capable of developing both public and private sector policies based on long-term leadership, shared norms, values and rules and institutions that build trust and cohesion; strategies built around 'importing what the rest of the world knows and exporting what they want'; and third, an impressive level of public investment in infrastructure, health and education.

To be able to develop national capacity in these three areas, Indonesia needs to develop a very dynamic public service.

To accelerate the transformation of its ineffective and corruption-prone public service at national and subnational levels, the country needs to speed up deliberations of the civil service bill, which over the last three years has moved at a snail's pace.  

From 2011 up to early 2013 at least 31 meetings were organized by Administrative Reforms Ministry as well as by the Steering Committee for National Bureaucracy Reform chaired by Vice President Boediono, but as of mid-May, no decision had been reached.     

A delay in this legislation shows the strength of resistance against a program pushing for change. This resistance is spearheaded by the top staff of major ministries who want to protect their short-term interests, not the long-term interests of Indonesian citizens.

Like Gregory in Beckett's drama, whose sole individual interest is to take very tight shoes off his feet, some high-ranking officials in the Indonesian bureaucracy are not willing to relinquish their powers and accept a new wave of change.

In a Cabinet meeting on May 23, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono stated he wanted to make a new Indonesian Civil Service Law a legacy of his administration.

Unlike the climax in Beckett's drama, with the continued absence of Godot at the end of the play, for the sake of the Indonesian people it is hoped that what they are waiting for will soon come true and the President will finally give his 'aye' to an Indonesian Civil Service Law for the 21st century.

The writer is professor of public policy at Gadjah Mada University (UGM) Yogyakarta and senior decentralization adviser of UNDP-Indonesia.