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Jakarta councillors end lackluster term
With new Jakarta city councillors being inaugurated on Monday for the 2019-2024 term, their predecessors are leaving office with a substandard track record for producing bylaws and having failed to select a new deputy governor
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With new Jakarta city councillors being inaugurated on Monday for the 2019-2024 term, their predecessors are leaving office with a substandard track record for producing bylaws and having failed to select a new deputy governor.
Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan had submitted to the Jakarta Council on March 4 the names of two candidates for the deputy governor position left vacant by Sandiaga Uno a year ago.
They are Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) politicians Ahmad Syaikhu and Agung Yulianto.
However, no progress has been made in the selection process, despite the establishment of a special committee on May 14 and comparative studies conducted on Grobogan regency in Central Java, Riau and Riau Islands to learn how to select a replacement deputy governor.
According to Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) political analyst Siti Zuhro, one of the factors that affected the outgoing council’s performance was the changing political dynamics of Jakarta, marked by a revolving door of governors.
The 2014-2019 Jakarta Council has served through five different city leaders since August 2014, when then-governor Joko “Jokowi” Widodo took several months off to run in the 2014 presidential election.
His then-deputy Basuki “BTP” Tjahaja Purnama served as acting governor prior to being inaugurated as governor in November that same year. His tenure was marked by tension in city administration’s relationship with the council, which affected the spending of the city budget, Siti said.
The city’s budget absorption was recorded at 59 percent, 68 percent, 82 percent, 83 percent and 82 percent from 2014 until 2018, respectively.
When BTP entered the 2017 gubernatorial race, the Home Ministry’s former autonomous regions directorate general, Sumarsono, served as acting governor for four and a half months.
When BTP lost and was later sentenced to two years in prison for blasphemy, his then-deputy governor Djarot Syaiful Hidayat replaced him until Anies Baswedan was inaugurated on Oct. 16, 2017.
“What we want to highlight that […] the political dynamics had affected the regional government’s performance and [tensions] had a negative impact. Councillors were unable to perform optimally,” Siti told The Jakarta Post on Friday.
The Jakarta Council passed 35 bylaws out of a total target of 136 in the city legislation program (Prolegda) in the past five years, exactly half the number of bylaws passed by the previous council.
After Anies took office, tensions between the executive and legislative branches seemed to ease — even though the latter denied several requests from the Jakarta administration, such as the divestment of shares in publicly listed beer brewer PT Delta Djakarta and a bylaw revision involving the operation of becak (pedicab) in the capital.
The head of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) faction at the Jakarta Council, Gembong Warsono, conceded that the council needed to improve its performance.
“What we have to improve is our productivity in deliberating bylaws. We cannot work alone as it correlates with the executive,” he told the Post.
“The executive proposed [bylaws for deliberation] at the start of every year but failed to complete any drafts, which makes it impossible for us to deliberate the bylaws.”
As a reelected councillor, he suggested that the proposed bylaws be indorsed only if the academic paper — a document required to make draft bylaw — was already available.
“Hopefully, we would be able to focus on passing more bylaws while also ensuring their quality,” he said. “We don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the last five years. Despite coming from different political parties, the executive and legislative share the same goal: to accelerate [development] in Jakarta.”
National Democratic (NasDem) Party faction head Bestari Barus suggested that the next council assess its internal working mechanisms, such as ensuring a thorough review of the city budget from its early stages of development.
“This way, we can identify a potentially failed program. Without clear supervision, the public won’t be able to benefit from our development programs,” he said. “[Councillors] need to be more rigorous and aspirational about the city's growing needs.”
Indonesian Parliament Watch (Formappi) researcher Lucius Karus criticized the outgoing council for failing to pass and even propose quality bylaws.
“The council proposed fewer bylaws than the executive […] This shows that there’s a gap between city councillors and their constituents because they [councillors] were unable to identify the public’s needs,” he said.
Lucius also slammed the councillors for blaming the city administration for dragging their feet in deliberating bylaws, arguing that the legislative body should have coordinated better with the executive regardless of their political views.
“This is all about their commitment to being a reliable public representative,” he said.
