The country’s founding president Sukarno was apparently the first to come up with the idea of relocating the national capital from Jakarta to a new territory as far away as Kalimantan. The idea was transmitted from one president to the next, but never materialized until the seventh, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, announced in April that it would go ahead, following a two-year study by the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas). The Jakarta Post’s Marchio Irfan Gorbiano, Imanuddin Razak and Samarinda correspondent Novi Abdi take a closer look into the issue in this Special Report.

Only days after the April 17 presidential election, President Jokowi announced his plan to move the country’s capital from Jakarta by establishing a new center of government off Java because of an urgent need to establish more equitable development across the nation and reduce the overpopulation on the country’s most populous island. His decision was based on a two-year study completed by Bappenas, which had come up with three alternatives.

The first was to keep Jakarta as the capital city but establish a government district around the Presidential Palace and the National Monument (Monas) to improve efficiency. The second was to establish a new capital located 50 to 70 kilometers outside Jakarta. The third one was to find a city off Java to replace Jakarta, preferably one located in the center of Indonesia.

However, as National Development Planning Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro has said, neither of the first two options could address the problem of Java’s overpopulation, since the island is home to some 60 percent
of the country’s approximately 260 million people, and those choices would not further the government’s aim to shift the nation from being Java-centric to having a more inclusive development agenda for the whole archipelago.

Jokowi has therefore opted for the third option, with the expectation that the new capital would represent fairness and could speed up development in the less-developed eastern Indonesia.

“The President has made it clear, based on our [Bappenas’] recommendation, that the decision to relocate the capital off Java is final,” Bambang told the Post in a recent interview. “To be more precise, to Kalimantan.”

Apart from the philosophical considerations about fairness and equal development in all parts of the country, particularly eastern Indonesia, the planned relocation of the capital is more practically about security and safety concerns.

Indonesia is prone to earthquakes, which are often followed by tsunami, because Indonesia is at the meeting point of three major continental plates — the Pacific, the Eurasian and the Indo-Australian — and the much smaller Philippine plate, which often shift. Indonesia is also on the “Ring of Fire”, a horseshoe-shaped area around the edges of the Pacific Ocean, from Australia to the Andes, along which 90 percent of all volcanic earthquakes occur.

Jakarta and many other cities on Java, Sumatra, Bali, West and East Nusa Tenggara and Maluku are prone to earthquakes as they sit on the Ring of Fire. Kalimantan is free of that risk.

Besides its being relatively isolated from volcanoes and earthquakes, the choice of Kalimantan for the site of the new capital city was due to its position, which is at the geographical center of country.

In essence, the decision of the Jokowi administration to move the capital to a new location off Java, precisely to Kalimantan, is similar to the idea launched by president Sukarno in the 1950s. At the time, Sukarno named Palangkaraya in Central Kalimantan and Samarinda in East Kalimantan as possible replacements for Jakarta as capital.

Street car park: Cars stuck in a traffic jam on Jl. Gatot Subroto in South Jakarta. Regular traffic jams are a common concern among the public as they cannot reach their destinations on time, leading not only to financial loss as a result of missed business deals or targets, but also energy loss as they have to use up more fuel.(JP/Seto Wardhana)

Sukarno, however, did not seriously follow up on his proposal, although he himself inaugurated the development of Palangkaraya City in April 1957. The founding president was of the opinion at the time that there were no other cities in the country that could equal the identity of Jakarta as home for the growth of nationalism. Jakarta, according to Sukarno, has also stood witness to numerous monumental and historic events in the country since the preindependence struggle, which peaked with the Red-and-White national flag hoisting that marked the birth of the independent country known as Indonesia.

Subsequent developments of national landmarks, such as the Monas, the Senayan legislature complex and the adjacent Senayan Sports Complex (now the Gelora Bung Karno sports complex), were further testimonials to Sukarno’s decision to maintain Jakarta as the capital.

Because Jakarta was already overcrowded, the president who succeeded Sukarno, Soeharto, had once proposed establishing a new capital in the Sentul area of Bogor, some 30 kilometers south of Jakarta. Initial development was already underway there, but the idea failed to materialize after Soeharto stepped down in 1998.

The sixth president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, continued planning for the relocation of the capital, ordering a thorough feasibility study into the matter. Nothing came of it by the end of Yudhoyono’s second five-year term in office.

Jokowi continued with the initiative, instructing Bappenas to conduct a feasibility study in 2017, which ended with a firm commitment to relocate the capital to an as-yet-undecided location in one of the three Kalimantan provinces: South, Central or East.

Nowhere to go: Riders push their motorcycles while cars move slowly along the inundated Jl. Cipete Raya in South Jakarta. Frequent flooding in the capital city has raised concerns over interrupted business activities prompting the government to consider relocating the capital to a flood-free region.(JP/Adi Purnama Yulistiawan)

A number of regencies in the three provinces had been proposed by local administrations as potential locations for the new capital. They include Palangkaraya and Gunung Mas regency in Central Kalimantan, Tanah Bumbu regency in South Kalimantan and Penajam regency in East Kalimantan.

While the location of the new capital has yet to be decided, the Jokowi administration wants to establish a center of government similar to Washington, DC, in a new city in Kalimantan, leaving Jakarta as the business, trade and financial hub similar to New York in the United States.

Minister Bambang said the new capital would house all three branches of Indonesia’s government, namely the executive, legislative and judiciary, as well as the headquarters of the National Police and the Indonesian Military, foreign embassies and international organizations. Meanwhile, financial sector institutions, such as Bank Indonesia, the Financial Services Authority (OJK) and the Investment Coordinating Board (BKPM), would remain in Jakarta.

The government still has one and a half years to finalize all preparations, including designing the masterplan and completing the legal and administrative paperwork for the relocation, before commencing construction in 2021. The first phase of relocation is to begin in 2024.

The possible relocation to the Bukit Soeharto community forest, which overlaps the Kutai Kartanegara and Kabupaten Penajam Paser Utara regencies in East Kalimantan, has been strongly opposed by the East
Kalimantan chapter of the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi) and the Mining Advocacy Network (Jatam).

“It’s such a negative development as it completely disregards the environmental capacity and supporting capacity of the area, which has already been damaged by plantations and mines there,” the director of Walhi’s East Kalimantan chapter, Yohana Tiko, said in a media statement on Saturday.

“The planned relocation to Bukit Soeharto forest will only worsen the environmental condition of the forest,” she added.

An activist with Jatam’s East Kalimantan chapter, Pradharma Rupang, said the planned relocation would only release the mining companies operating in East Kalimantan from their obligation to restore their abandoned mines. The companies have been blamed for leaving behind deep holes in many parts of the province.

“You can imagine how the state is subdued by the mining companies, which could escape responsibility although they had damaged the environment,” said Pradharma.