Several politicians knocked on his recommendation with a touch of resource nationalism, to which he responded by saying it was insincere to assume that local foremen were capable of overseeing such a key strategic project.

“We can get so hypocritical sometimes. When I said that we should use bule-bule [white foreigners] to lead the IKN project, people responded with anger. They said, ‘Can’t we do it ourselves?' Of course we cannot,” he said during a business launch event at his Jakarta office on Monday.

Defending his decision, the senior minister explained that recruiting foreign supervisors was the only way to ensure the quality of IKN’s most important development projects. Not only would these projects help improve the IKN’s image among investors, they would allow local talents to gain from the transfer of knowledge that would entail.

He added that the suggestion was intended for President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.

The government has pushed ahead with its Aug. 17, 2024 deadline for some of the most crucial infrastructure in the IKN project, including a new presidential palace, on hopes of celebrating Indonesia’s 79th Independence Day in Nusantara.

For many observers, the success of the IKN project is poised to become Jokowi’s crowning achievement after leading the country over two terms of development-heavy policies. It therefore came as hardly a surprise to many that the government would do whatever it took to guarantee smooth progress in developing the new capital.

But Luhut’s suggestion also rubbed some people the wrong way, with several raising national security concerns while others pointing to lost opportunities for local workers.

On Friday, a politician from the opposition Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) emphasized that local workers would know the lay of the land much better than any foreign worker ever could, and that the only perceived risk to quality would be imprecise planning.

Then on Monday, Nusyirwan Soejono, a member of the ruling Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), called Luhut’s statement “degrading”. He went on to point out that many of the country’s previous projects were capably handled by local workers, including the light rapid transit (LRT) project and facilities for the 2018 Asian Games, hosted in Palembang and Jakarta.

“Pak [Mr.] Luhut isn’t even involved in the developmental phase of the IKN. Even the Public Works and Housing Ministry seems to have no reservations appointing local supervisors,” he said in a media statement.

“Additionally, we need to account for IKN’s security. It is inappropriate to use foreign workers in this sense.”

Several members from the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin) were not immediately available to respond to The Jakarta Post’s request for comment.

Tight deadlines

The ambitious plan to relocate the Indonesian capital to East Kalimantan has faced numerous challenges since its conception, mostly in relation to financing and uncertainty ahead of next year’s elections.

With only a year left to his second and final term, Jokowi has now pulled all the stops to ensure the continuity and success of the IKN project, frequently sending high-level officials around the world to entice foreign governments and businesses to pour their money into the project.

Estimated to cost around Rp 466 trillion (US$32.6 billion), 80 percent of the IKN project’s price tag is to be covered by as yet unfound investors, a fact that has led some PDI-P members to suggest in private that Jokowi’s successor could still abandon the project.

With much to be done before Jokowi steps down, Luhut’s announcement on Friday coincided with the government’s disclosure of a plan to bring in more Chinese workers to run the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed rail (HSR), at least in its first year of operation.

Observers have suggested that these public statements indicated the government’s tendency to delegate some of the country’s most important projects to foreign workers, at least in part, in order to meet tight deadlines.

In the case of the HSR, the government has only a few months to finish the project to meet the operational deadline set for Aug. 17 this year, which some analysts have described as unrealistic, given the amount of preparations and processes needed to obtain the green light for the new service’s operations and safety.

The Transportation Ministry has already said it was open to expanding some jobs to foreign workers for the train’s first year of operation. And in May, the Manpower Ministry added that it would support a “relaxation” of foreign labor rules if push came to shove.