Creating Prosperity for the Country

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States who had the courage to create policies to abolish slavery in his country, said in a seminal speech, “A house divided against itself cannot stand”.

Indonesia has been overshadowed for a very long time by divisions due to fanaticism for the political elite, which has been marked by the clash of identity politics and hate speech. Now that the 2019 presidential election is over, it is time for us to return to thinking and act together as one nation to determine the issues that are vital to the country’s future direction. One critical agenda is to direct all available resources towards creating prosperity for the entire nation.

As progressive world economist Joseph E. Stiglitz points out in his work People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent (2019), two benchmarks exist for assessing whether a country\'s economic-political order is healthy or sick, fair or ineffective. One is wealth creation, which benefits the lives of its citizens, and the second is wealth grabbing, which promotes social division and inequality.

KOMPAS/JUMARTO YULIANUS

A farmer examines a rice field on May 2, 2019 in the swamplands of Jejangkit, Barito Kuala Regency, South Kalimantan. Rice seedlings have not yet been planted in the field, which still contains water at an average depth of 1 meter due to high rainfall.

Creating prosperity

The future of a country will be better when governance succeeds in utilizing all resources for the creation of shared prosperity. A social order that has the capacity to provide high social welfare and living standards maintains productivity that is based on innovation, investment in science and technology, public infrastructure, and guarantees social opportunities for every citizen to improve their economic life through education, health and a healthy environment.

In contrast, the social order of a country is in an unhealthy state when the nation’s prosperity can only be enjoyed by a handful of the richest, dominant elite, which absorbs the prosperity that is the allotment of the majority of citizens.

Under such a condition, the majority of citizens do not have access to a variety of innovations and achievements in science, technology and infrastructure. The state does not provide the basic rights that enable citizens to prosper: education, health, decent work and a healthy environment.

Indonesia has fought hard for the last five years through the legacies of the New Order system, characterized by looting wealth, to struggle towards creating wealth for the benefit of its citizens.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes of the strong systemic style of plundering wealth that is taking place in this country, the power system of the political order works by providing wide room for a handful of political business alliances to enjoy state resources and leave behind the majority. The battle between wealth grabbing and wealth creation is no easy fight. February 2017 data from Oxfam on real social inequality evidences the strength of the thick walls in the still ongoing practice of grabbing wealth. One percent of the richest people in Indonesia (2.6 million people) control about 49 percent of the country\'s total wealth, compared to 40 percent of the poorest people (100 million people) who are fighting for 1.4 percent of the country\'s total wealth.

The four richest people in Indonesia have total assets worth as much as US$25 billion, compared to the US$24 billion owned by 100 million of the poorest citizens. All take place in a corrupt economic-political order that is based on the extractive sector.

Taking collective steps to encourage the creation of shared prosperity still leads to a big problem. If human capital is a benchmark of the efforts to create shared prosperity, as Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati acknowledged, the Manpower Ministry’s data shows that the national workforce is dominated by workers with minimal skills (elementary and junior high school graduates) at 60.24 percent.

Contrary to the majority unskilled workforce, the open unemployment rate consists mostly of vocational school (SMK) graduates (11.24 percent). Only 11.65 million skilled workers hold undergraduate degrees (Kompas.com, Nov. 5, 2018; BPS 2018). The data shows that our country still has a large job to do if knowledge, innovation and science are on the front lines of creating fair and equal wealth.

It does not necessarily mean that President Joko Widodo\'s government has not made an effort to encourage wealth creation and curb wealth grabbing for nearly five years. In 2018, for example, Indonesia rose one rank to 85th in the Global Innovation Index, even though compared to other Southeast Asian countries, Indonesia was ranked 14th out of 15 other countries (kemendagri.go.id; liputan6.com).

Various series of policies, such as policies to accelerate rural development, improve public infrastructure, promote culture, and agrarian reform, need to be appreciated as a way to open up spaces for empowering the country’s resources to create prosperity.

Will to give

The policy measures taken so far in the macro political economy are indeed very likely to be deflected or stalled by the system of power that is still controlled by a social alliance of oligarchs. However, the politics of governing a state can only be accompanied by two public moral virtues: patience and the will to give. Former US president Barack Obama revised his slogan in 2010 from "Yes we can" to "Yes we can, but it\'s not going to happen overnight". Patience is key.

Meanwhile, Ir. Soekarno concluded in his work “Nationalism, Islamism, and Marxism”, written at the age of 26 in 1927: "We must be able to receive, but we must also be able to give. Unity will not occur if each party does not want to give a little, too." Every decision towards progress requires collaboration in solidarity and collective giving.

With hope, patience and the will to give, we can recombine our energies to achieve prosperity and happiness together. Please end this political dispute!

Airlangga Pribadi Kusman, Political Science Lecturer, Airlangga University; Director, The Initiative Institute