Jakartass Home thoughts from abroad. Alien thoughts from home.

First the good news.

Six elections were held on Tuesday in Lampung district, South Sumatra, for regents and mayors. All candidates had to have the backing of political parties. Abdurizal Bakrie, chairman of the Golkar Party and probably the most reviled national politician in Indonesia, campaigned and predicted at least four victories.

Golkar was “soundly trounced” in five of the elections.

Now the not so new bad news.

Some stats from a recent Post editorial show that there is concern that many Indonesian children miss out on what is euphemistically called education but in fact is schooling.

National Education Minister Muhammad Nuh said that last year, around 1.7 percent of primary school students in the country were unable to finish their education, while 10 percent of those who graduated did not continue on to junior high.

Meanwhile, according to the national labor survey (Sakernas), 4.3 million out of 35.7 million of children aged between 10 and 17 in Indonesia have entered the workforces, which surely limits their opportunity to attend their classes.

Then there is a group children who can’t go back to school because of corporate negligence. And this one group in particular is the reason why there will never be a President Bakrie.

These children are among the 40,000 ‘refugees’ who had to flee the Sidoarjo mudflow, which, it is generally agreed, was caused by the incompetence of Lapindo Brantas, the oil drilling company owned by the Bakrie family.

Even cock-ups on a such a monumental scale as this one can be ‘excused’, but to ignore the plight of those who suffer from one’s incompetence cannot.

Mujtaba Hamdi of Coalition of Movements in Support of Justice for the Lapindo Mudflow Victims, which was founded for the sole purpose of seeking justice for the 40,000 people displaced by the disaster, said there were 103 children – from elementary to high school age – whose educations were now threatened because their parents’ incomes had declined following the disaster and neither the government nor Lapindo had provided compensation for education..

The coalition plans to collect Rp 43,644,500 (US$4,800) to buy books, uniforms and to pay for exams and building fees to help the Sidoarjo children.

Anyone wishing to donate can visit www.korbanlumpur.info and www.jatam.org.

I’ve just returned from a 3-day workshop in Surabaya yet I can’t say that I’ve actually learnt much about Indonesia’s second city.

Inevitably there were problems in actually getting there; we were told that our flight on Batavia Air – motto: Trust Us To Fly – was delayed by two hours, but we could transfer to one scheduled to depart half an hour later than the one we expected to board.

Ok, we said, checked in and went off to have a leisurely cup of coffee. Then we heard our names paged. We were late boarding the flight due to depart at 5 because it was actually set to depart at the time we originally expected to leave, 16:30.

A passenger informed us that the flight we were now on had been delayed since 3pm.

Surabaya’s Juanda International Airport has recently undergone major renovation, with a dedicated toll road providing access. Its code used to be SBY but has been changed, presumably because of President SBY, to SUB.

Arriving was familiar: it was akin Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta. There were no trolleys available to shift our load of books for participants and cakes for bosses. I went outside in search of one through the one narrow doorway to be accosted with crowds yelling at me – “Taxi, Mister?” . That I actually found a trolley was something of a miracle, and that I managed to manoevre it back into the arrivals hall dedicated through the crowds exiting by the one door even more so.

We queued for a taxi but were then informed that we needed a prepaid ticket; only one company has the right to operate there, which meant re-entering the throng. At least the driver knew where the Ciputra Hotel and Golf Club is; we were booked there because it was apparently the only hotel in Surabaya with vacancies. (Really??). As it was dark, we saw little of anything and learnt less about the city as we both had problems deciphering the dialectical sludge spoken by East Javanese men.

As we reached the Ciputra Hotel, all we had been aware of was that it is plonked in the middle of a hitherto green area. There were no bellhops to greet us and carry our heavy load and it was a long, not very triumphal, trudge therough a colonade to the reception desk in the distance, and we had to ask for porter assistance to our rooms. At least the beds were comfortable, and having a hot shower in the early morning was an unanticipated pleasure.

Transport was laid on for our first day’s toil and that was when we grew aware of what what was being wrought. There were green fields on which rose grandiose mansions rampant with tall frontage columns, strange ornate ‘eastern’ domes atop, but set in splendid isolation. Not one was alike except in perverse pretensions. I couldn’t help exclaiming “Yuk, that’s ugly” at regular intervals. What seemed even stranger was that for all the size of the plots, no space had been allocated for a garden.

All seemed to announce how much money had been spent and how little intelligence (or humility) had been used in the designs. On the five minute drive to where there were people, we saw nowhere to eat; offices and salons with spas, yes, but it seemed, correctly as it turned out, that without transport of our own we were marooned and doomed to eat in the hotel’s Resto.

The food was indeed adequate, but at Rp.80,000 for a much needed large Bintang at the end of the day, not anything to write home about. (This begs the question as to why I mention it here.) I stuck with the American breakfast, and my colleague with the familiar nasi goreng – fried rice – for his.

I wrote a post about the international real estate industry ‘going green’ a couple of weeks ago, and without knowing how soon I would encounter his particular concept, used Ciputra as an example of how little the industry really cares about the environment, and thinks only of short-term profits.

Hotel Ciputra was to prove this at the last. My colleague had to stay a further night thanks to a hastily arranged presentation, leaving me to come home alone. It would have been nice to have gone back to my room after our day’s exertions. However, checkout time is 12 noon and I wanted 4pm. As far as we could tell, room occupancy was about 10%, if that; most of the ‘guests’ were there for rounds of golf.

Stretching the rules was, of course, impossible – except for a 50% surcharge + 21% tax etc. etc. so I moved my luggage into colleague’s room and vowed to never stay there again .

Notes:

• My room had a dual flush toilet; my colleague’s didn’t.
• There was a small notice about conserving water – cut down laundry bills by using the same bed sheets for more than one night.
• The baths were deep.
• A few, very few, farmers could be spotted among the mansions tending their small plots.
• I didn’t see any solar panels or a solar water tank on any mansion roof.
• There was no public transport to, let alone within, Ciputraland.
• We guessed that within 3/4 years all the plots would be built on resulting in yet another middle-class ghetto, its residents living in splendid isolation.

Next time we will definitely find rooms in another hotel; we prefer to be amongst people.

As I wrote above, we saw little of Surabaya. We saw no buses and few angkots (people carriers). What did catch our eye was an extremely long yet-to-be opened shopping mall, all glass frontage. As to why it remains unopened seems a little strange: it can’t be connected to the national electricity grid which can be seen in front, pylons and cables striding across the wasteland.

So, leaving the splendid isolation of the western outer reach of the city, and leaving my colleague behind, I headed to the eastern outer reach and checked in with bags of time to spare for my flight at 19:20.

It was, of course, delayed for two hours.

Yep, I trust Batavia Air to fly, but never on time.
…………………………….
Footnote
I didn’t have time to get to the Sidoarjo mudflow which locals have named Lapindo. It’s amazing how much hatred Bakrie has generated.

I knew about the article below co-written by André Vltchek and waited to post it here so that with a little snippet edited out of the original I could highlight a little known added imposition on the 'refugees' of LUSI – LUmpur -Indonesian for mud and SIdoarjo, the location.

Firstly, I would like to draw your attention to two sentences: Nur Kholifah is one of hundreds who received about $1,500, about 20 per cent of what the company promised, she says. She immediately handed over a quarter to a legal team battling for compensation.

The following is the bit edited out from the article.

Grasping Local Officials

Organizing demonstrations against Lapindo and pushing for victim compensation
became big business for several local individuals. They organized in a team called Tim Pengurus/Pendata and they have commonly charged victims 30% of any sum they receive from Lapindo.

Ms. Nur Kholifah further explained, “Some members of the team – themselves from inundated villages – have already built big houses with the money we paid them. The team mainly consists of Pak RT (neighborhood chiefs). We agreed on the cuts in advance – we had to, otherwise we would receive no compensation at all.”

So, if the 20% compensation paid was Rp.13.5 million (c.$1,500), 25% (Rp.3 million) went to lawyers and 30% (Rp.4 million) went to grasping local officials, leaving just Rp.6 million (c.$550) to the victims of Lapindo's incompetence.

Not all 'refugees', out of the more than 13,000 families (as at May 2007) have received even the limited compensation, which even in full would be by no means enough to replace their lost homes and livelihoods, and their children's disrupted schooling,

The mudflow is continuing, the ground is sinking as the mud escapes and, to add insult to injury, PT Lapindo Brantas has just been awarded a blue ranking "for complying with environmental standards set by the government."

On Wednesday last week, the ministry announced the results of its audit on 516 companies for the 2006-2007 period. These companies voluntarily took part in an environmental rating program, popularly known as Proper. The program classified companies into gold, green, blue, blue minus, red, red minus and black categories. They were judged according to achievements in controlling air and water pollution and in fulfilling environmental impact analyses (Amdal). Corporate social responsibility (CSR) program performance was also included.

Corporate social responsibility? To who? Its owners, including the Minister of Social Welfare, Abdurizal Bakrie, Indonesia's richest man?

Yet again, Indonesia lets itself become a laughing stock throughout the world for its brazen self-promotion and its seeming lack of empathy with its citizens..

And for this ibu, it all remains the same, a crying shame.

There is Something Rotten in The State

No, I’m not referring to Hadja Kouyate & Ali Boulo Santo whose album Manding-Ko has been reviewed thus: Two deeply rotted artists not afraid to push the edges out a bit make (the album) very pleasant to listen to: it won’t make you dance, though there are parts a person with imagination could dance to. Most of us would have to be content to just sway with the music.

Whilst hundreds die in flash floods in South Sulawesi blamed … on environmental degradation caused by clearing of forest areas and the construction of residences by rivers, thousands more have become displaced persons thanks to the seeming incompetence of an oil drilling company.

Oil and gas company PT Lapindo Brantas was “grossly negligent” in failing to implement prudent operating measures that led to massive pollution from an East Java gas well, one of its partners said. Gas and mud spewed out of cracks in the gas well on May 29, forcing hundreds of residents of nearby Tenokenongo village, Sidoarjo, to evacuate their homes. The overflow also forced state turnpike operator PT Jasa Marga to temporarily close parts of the Surabaya-Gempol turnpike, causing billions of rupiah in losses to the company as well as disrupting the distribution of goods in East Java.

Imagine if you will, because I can’t find a picture online, foul smelling oily sludge oozing from the ground and spreading, spreading through your hectares of rice fields, through your village and inundating your home, a home it is unlikely you’ll be able to live in again.

Imagine, too, the Vice President coming to offer ‘sweet promises‘ which so far amount to Rp 20,000 (less than US$2) per person.

With all the publicity, accusations and excuses ~ apparently it was the earthquake in Yogya 2 days previously and a day’s drive away what done it ~ there has been one notable absentee, the Coordinating Minister for the People’s Welfare, Aburizal Bakrie.

Could it be because his family has a stake in the drilling company, PT Lapindo Brantas? This is a unit of publicly listed oil and gas company PT Energi Mega Persada (EMP) which has a 50% stake in the PSC Brantas Block which is being explored.

The displaced people of Sidoarjo, currently about 5,000 with nigh on 1,000 having received medical treatment for breathing problems, can be forgiven for thinking that there’s something rotten in the State.