Indonesian President Joko Widodo is rushing to reassure investors and bureaucrats about his US$32 billion new capital city in a malaria-prone pocket of Borneo, after the resignations of two officials overseeing the plan raised fresh doubts about its future.
Widodo’s announcement that he is to start working next month from an office in Nusantara, a giant construction site more than 1,200km from the current capital, Jakarta, is unlikely to allay fears about his legacy project, analysts said.
“Investor confidence has dropped, I think. They were already in doubt and in ‘wait-and-see’ mode, partly because of the unclear land status, partly because of a lack of transparency in governance of the new capital,” said Yanuar Nugroho, the president’s former deputy chief of staff.
Photo: Reuters
“The resignations worsen this... Instead of explaining what really happened, the government is trying to cover it up,” he said, describing the president as in damage control mode.
Traveling to Nusantara just a day after the two respected technocrats in charge resigned without explanation, the president broke ground on schools, office complexes and promised foreign investment was coming.
However, years after the president announced his signature project, intended to ease the burden on the traffic-ridden, polluted, sinking and over-populated Jakarta, zero foreign funding has been committed.
A presidential spokesperson referred question regarding doubt on Nusantara’s future to previous Widodo’s comment saying the project will continue as plan.
Jokowi, as the president is known, leaves office in October after serving the maximum two terms as his legacy project faces a host of problems, including land issues, water supplies, the threat of tropical diseases such as malaria, and widespread reluctance among civil servants to move.
An even bigger stumbling block could be president-elect Prabowo Subianto.
Prabowo won February’s election promising “continuity,” but the ex-commander has a legacy project of his own: a US$29 billion “free meal” program intended to curb stunting.
Privately, Prabowo is yet to discuss moving to Nusantara with his team, and while he has pledged to continue developing it, it is unlikely to be at the same speed, one politician with direct knowledge said.
A spokesperson for Prabowo did not immediately respond to request for comment, but publicly Prabowo has said he is committed to continuing the project.
Members of Prabowo’s coalition have also privately discussed doubts about the capacity of the state budget to fund both the new capital and the nutrition program, a separate senior politician involved said.
“If resources become scarce, [Nusantara] could just become a backburner item,” political analyst Kevin O’Rourke said. “There’s going to be a lot of competition for other spending items in the Prabowo administration.”
Envisioned as an uber-modern, green smart city complete with flying taxis, Indonesia’s Nusantara is more technologically and logistically ambitious than new administrative capitals in the region such as Myanmar’s Naypyidaw, and Malaysia’s Putrajaya.
Thousands of civil servants are scheduled to be sent to Nusantara starting in September, but some are reluctant to go. Of almost a dozen civil servants who spoke to Reuters, only two wanted to move, while others said they would consider quitting or seeking a transfer if asked.
“There is nothing there, health and education facilities and so on,” one civil servant in the communications ministry said. “It’s not a choice, but a sacrifice.”
The government has ensured basic facilities, including apartments, water, electricity and Internet will be ready when civil servants arrive, said Danis Sumadilaga, the head of the infrastructure task force for the Nusantara project.
“We must understand that not all of the facilities will be available in an instant...We are going there for work, what kind of facilities you want? You can’t expect it to be like Jakarta,” he said in a recent interview.
Other key government buildings, including the presidential office, state palace and some ministerial buildings will be ready in August when Indonesia holds its independence day.
Foreign investment has been held back due to the election and associated risks, BritCham Indonesia CEO Chris Wren said, adding that interest was now picking up.
“There are interested parties as investors across the range of needs and opportunities — infrastructure, smart city tech, utilities, education, etc,” he said. “However, the sense remains that the pitch is far from perfected at this point.”
Public health experts have also expressed concern about malaria, with East Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo where the new capital is located, home to the nation’s second-highest rate of the mosquito-borne disease.
The government has stressed the capital site is malaria-free, but transmission remains a risk because of undocumented workers who illegally log nearby forests, epidemiologists say.
Official data show the rate of malaria in Balikpapan, the closest city to Nusantara, more than doubled from 2022 to last year.
“If they are not careful, I suspect malaria cases will increase in the next six months to a year,” said Iqbal Elyazar, from Oxford University’s clinical research unit in Jakarta.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS