New Year always means new challenges

Donny Syofyan, 

Are you excited about the upcoming New Year?  Did you make any plans for New Year’s Eve?  How are you going to spend the night of Dec. 31, 2010? People often pose the question as a matter of routine before the New Year comes.

The turn of the year is always marked by crowded parties. It seems that they would bring the big changes we expect, whereas in fact, the expectation is nothing but imagination, not seen and perceived reality. We, Indonesians, should not waste much time and energy on the New Year’s party without going beyond the symbolic message in the celebration.
2010 has been a year of major disasters: Volcanic eruptions, floods, tsunami, train collisions, landslides, famine or food crises and deforestation. Concerning political and security issues, some achievements are worth celebrating, such as the US resumption of cooperation with the Army’s Special Forces (Kopassus) and the police’s success in tackling terrorists.
But elites’ thirst for power has contributed to perpetuating further political ills, among others, the decision by the House of Representatives to pursue an investigation into the bailout of Bank Century, channeling bribes to National Police generals, criminalized the anticorruption agency (KPK) and many others.
Together with the preceding problems of 2010, many challenges remain in the upcoming 2011. Population, education and internationalism are just a few issues.
First, regarding population administration, Indonesia held a census in 2010. It would provide a blue- print for national development in times to come. It requires the government, particularly the Home Ministry to manage the registration of citizens in a more accurate manner. A breakthrough yet carried out thus far is implementing a national system called e-KTP, an electronic identity card.
The breakthrough will be a definite advantage to public affairs, like efficient tax payment, accurate counterterrorism programs, or an electronic voting process. Even bureaucratic reform can benefit from such a computerized and electronic population administration system.
Second, Indonesia’s performance on research and development is still relatively poor compared to neighboring ASEAN countries. In a book published by the Research and Technology Ministry entitled Ekonomi Berbasis Pengetahuan/EBP (Knowledge-Based Economics), budget allocation for research and development in Indonesia is 0.07 percent of the GDP, much smaller than Singapore (2.36 percent), Malaysia (0.63 percent), Thailand (0.25 percent) and Vietnam (0.19 percent).
Around the world, countries are evolving to become knowledge-based societies. Take Finland for instance, which spends US$1,000 per person on scientific research, while less than $300 is spent annually in Indonesia. Moreover, the number of published books averages one for every 491 British citizens, while in Indonesia it is one for every 25,000. But that should not be much of a surprise considering that 9.7 million Indonesian citizens are illiterate, 6 million of whom are women.
Though the government has allocated Rp 1.9 trillion (US$211 million), almost double the allocation in 2005, for research and development, many factors are involved in causing our poor intellectual works and authorship. In Indonesia, for instance, writing textbooks is not a profit-making job.
Publishers and bookstores may earn a lot, while the authors do not. It is not surprising that many potential authors are reluctant to write and pin the blame on publishers for taking much more money from book sales. On the contrary, the publishers seem to scapegoat the poor reading culture of the society, which, in turn, bodes ill to the marketing of textbooks.
Third, internationalism should be given specific attention. The year 2010 may have been one of the bleakest for Indonesia’s international profile, especially considering border disputes with Malaysia and Indonesia’s poor migrant workers in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. Despite strong public pressure on the government to severe diplomatic ties with Malaysia and stop sending migrant workers abroad, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono remained firm on using diplomacy as opposed to a more radical and confrontational approach.
Yet, Indonesia’s position as the largest nation in Southeast Asia, or its performance in countering terrorism, will carry no great weight because the Indonesian government has not increased its soft power.
While we count on the three issues mentioned above, we should not disregard other great troubles and opportunities in store for us.
Wish you a very Happy New Year 2011!


The writer is a graduate of the University of Canberra in Australia and a lecturer at Andalas University, Padang.