Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (21 page)

The beach swept around in a long, powdery arc. There was not a soul around, only vague reminders of human life. An outrigger canoe lay on its side in the brush. Beside a tumbledown shelter of palm fronds, a fallen tree trunk. The only sound was a tiny rippling of waves. It was a pleasure to be still in this shimmering place. I sat down on the tree trunk to read.

‘I’m sorry, I’m going to have to chop that up.’ I leapt up and found myself faced with a muscled torso, dark, shiny with sweat. Above it a thick beard, a mouth of blackened teeth, reddish eyes, wild curls crinkling slightly grey at the temples. The man was swinging an axe.

We stared at one another. Then he smiled. ‘Come, meet my wife,’ and he called her out of the tumbledown shelter next to which I sat.

The man was a fisherman, but during the west monsoon, when the sea was rough, he and his wife turned to cooking salt. He needed the tree I was sitting on to feed into the fire that smouldered under an oil-drum of seawater, boiling it down into pure white salt.

Without asking me a single question – not so much as a ‘where are you from?’ – the salt-cooker launched into a diatribe about the silk-shirted princelings who had taken over the hospital. ‘Look, look around you, this is Savu, only this,’ he swept his arm about over deserted beach, abandoned boats, the drum of bubbling seawater. ‘But we think it is a good idea to have our own government, to build offices, to import posh cars for our very own crop of MPs.’

He described the Bupati and his various rivals as ‘Savu Kupang’ – meaning that though they were technically from Savu, they had been in the provincial capital across the water all of their adult lives. After the provinces lost power to the districts in the post-Suharto reforms, these bureaucratic migrants came back to whip up support for a new district, each in the hope that he might be crowned king.

‘They went on and on at us, about how we could never realize our true potential as long as we were living on scraps from Kupang,’ the salt-maker said. ‘[The Bupati and his clique] talk about dignity, but the new district was about
their
dignity.
They
want to be treated like kings.
They
want to be driven around,
they
want people to salute them, they want to go to Jakarta and be treated as Somebody.’

His wife, patiently skimming stray insects off the top of the salt-soup with a spoon shaped from a coconut shell, nodded quietly. ‘Those were the people who wanted the new district. The ones ambitious to rule us,’ she said. ‘The funny thing is, before, they were proud to be big officials in Kupang. Now, suddenly, they are “one of us”.’

It’s hard labour, this dragging of dead palm trees down to the camp, the chopping of wood. But the market for fine-quality cooked salt is pretty good, the pair said. The previous week, they had sold a sack for 200,000 rupiah (US$22) to the hole-in-the-wall restaurant opposite the hospital. ‘That’s where all the officials get their lunch from,’ said the salt-maker. ‘Just think, maybe the Bupati has been eating my sweat.’ His eyes twinkled.

People who want to hear heels clicked when they step out of their car sometimes lobby for years before parliamentarians in Jakarta finally agree to create a new district. Local worthies invite decision-makers from Jakarta to their area, organizing mass rallies that bear witness to the
aspirasi rakyat
, the ‘Will of The People’, all dying to be ruled by someone close to home. To those People, the worthies sell the idea of an end to neglect by far-off rulers and the dawn of a new era of prosperity.

In potentially rich areas, local power-mongers will try to have a new district carved around a natural resource, a big deposit of nickel or coal, for example. If we have our own district, they say to The People, we’ll be able to keep more of our wealth. We won’t have to kick the money up to the district capital in some other clan’s land, to the province, to Jakarta.

In poor areas such as Savu, the local worthies argue instead that hand-outs from Jakarta will make The People richer because they won’t go first through the capital of the old district, to be siphoned off by some other clan. The handouts from the centre will be used to kick-start the local economy, the princelings say, so that soon the infant district will be able to stand on its own.

In fact, these two contentions cannot both be true. If the central government wants to hand money out to more poorer districts, it has to take it from richer districts. In any case, Jakarta cannot legally spend more than 26 per cent of the nation’s revenues on the equalization funds that provide handouts to the poorer districts such as Savu. Unless the creation of new districts leads to an increase in Indonesia’s overall productivity, more districts inevitably means less money for each district.

I puttered further around the island, hoping to find some weavers. Only once, I saw a woman wearing a sarong in the classic flowered pattern that Savu was famed for when last I was here. I stopped to ask if she had woven it herself, but she was deaf. Her daughter wasn’t interested: ‘What, all that tying up cotton and dropping it into colours over and over and then eventually it comes out a flower or a bird?’ she said, when I asked about
ikat
weaving. ‘Who has the patience for that any more?’

I did come across a row of women perched on pyramids of grapefruit-sized rocks they had shuffled up in basketloads from the beach. Their task now was to sit under little palm-leaf shelters and use iron mallets to smash the rocks into chips for construction crews. The men, for their part, were still shinning twenty metres up the lontar palm trees to collect sap that could be boiled down into sugar or distilled into booze. A few people were farming seaweed; that involved tying empty water bottles at intervals along long ropes, attaching little bunches of seaweed palm-distance apart between them, then floating the whole necklace out in the water, wading-distance from shore until the little bunches of seaweed grew into big bunches of seaweed.

None of these things seemed destined to displace handouts from Jakarta as the source of 96 per cent of Savu’s income, nor to make it ‘an innovative, advanced and dignified district’.

The day after my encounter with the Bupati of Savu, I drove the coast road to the south of Savu, then ventured back to Seba across Savu’s hump-backed spine, where lontar palms the height of a four-storey building sprang from the dry earth, and toasted hills swept down to azure sea. The view was beautiful, but the road was spiteful.

Driving on roads this bad is no fun at all. Your spine thuds down to half its natural length, then shoots back out at odd angles. Your right hand, locked around the handlebar, has turned to marble. Your left is buzzy-numbed by the accelerator. Your teeth rattle, and you can actually feel your eyes shaking around in their sockets as you flip your attention from the pothole coming up on the left to the loose scree a bit further ahead on the right. Your thighs are gripping the saddle of the bike and your calves are permanently tensed, the left one pumping your ankle back and forth over the gears, the right keeping a foot cocked attentively over the brake, both ready to stamp down into the dust or mud below at any moment to save yourself from going over. As my elegant Parisian friend Nathalie said when I slung her on the back of a motorbike and drove her across Sumba some years ago: ‘
C’est quand même un pays qui fait mal aux fesses
’ – ‘It’s a country that’s hard on the bum.’

By the time the sun notched down to evening cool, I was wishing I had not taken this ‘short cut’. Then I crested a hill and saw before me a miraculous ribbon of black velvet unfolding down into the valley before me. Real, smooth tarmac. I quadrupled my speed, loosened my grip on the handlebars, relaxed my thighs and started to look around, to admire the majestic palm trees silhouetted against an oranging sky.

As I zoomed towards the top of the next hill, a solitary figure flagged me down. He was a well-dressed man younger than myself, shouting into a cell phone, an unexpected sight on this barren hilltop. I waited until he had finished yelling and offered him a lift. ‘No, I’ve got a bike, thanks. I just wanted to warn you about the road.’

About five metres beyond the crest of the hill the road swerved sharply to the left, then disappeared, tumbling with no warning at all back into the river of rocks and ruts that I’d battled with for most of the journey.

This gentleman was, it turned out, the youngest MP in the local parliament, and a member of the public works committee. He had received the project completion report for this section of road from the public works department, and had come out to have a look. He found that the contractors had grown tired of digging the drainage ditch; it ran out a hundred metres before the tarmac did. The asphalt was neither bedded nor edged. This meant that the road would slide gracefully over the side of the hill at the first real rains. ‘They may as well have just painted the dirt black,’ he said, angry. He tried his phone again, but the contractor was no longer taking his calls.

I had seen on an information board in town that the twenty-five-kilometre road was being remade at a cost of 2.2 billion rupiah, so about US$10,000 per kilometre. Why not start from town and work progressively? Why was this little strip of tarmac airlifted into the middle of the wrecked road?

The MP explained that large contracts such as road-building, awarded by the public works department, are routinely split into several different
proyek
, each one awarded to a different contractor.

Proyek
. It was a word I was to hear endlessly, part of the vast system of patronage that props up Indonesia’s current ‘Etc.’. What was interesting in this case was that a local MP was actually trying to provide some oversight for the ‘project’ doled out by the Bupati and his team. Few Indonesians expect local parliamentarians to make any real effort to call the executive to account. Their job, people often joke, is to perform the ‘Four S’s’: Show up, Sit down, Shut up, Salary.
*

I asked the MP how his committee decided on the technical specifications for the roads, and how much was allocated to maintenance. ‘Honestly, I’ve no idea. We’re new to this; no one really knows how to calculate a budget, so we just end up trusting the guys in the executive.’ That was problematic in itself, he said, since the local public works department – the executive – had no trained engineers to speak of. ‘It’s the blind leading the blind.’

With each new flowering of the great firework of decentralization, Indonesia needs to find more people who can run a health department or who can plan infrastructural development, more people who can review budgets or plan a curriculum. Ideally, each district wants to identify that talent among its own local population. In dozens of the newly created districts in previously neglected provinces, that talent just doesn’t exist.

‘I’m not sure anyone in the department [of public works] can even read a spreadsheet,’ the MP told me as he kicked a clump of loose tarmac from the newly laid road. ‘And we can’t go asking Kupang for help, because after all, we were the ones who wanted to split from them and have our own district.’

From Savu, I took the Pelni ferry to Kupang, in the west of Timor. I had wanted to hop another Pelni through one of Indonesia’s newest districts, Southwest Maluku. Its forty-eight tiny islands dot the sea east of Timor, covering some 600 kilometres all the way up to Tanimbar in the west. But the monthly ferry had just left.

After much prodding, the harbour master at Kupang had told me that
perintis
boats made the journey up through Southwest Maluku every couple of weeks. He had looked me up and down dubiously.
Perintis
literally means pioneer; it’s a polite way of describing services that go to places no other transport wants to go. ‘You understand it’s a cargo ship?’ the harbour master had said, in a tone that suggested that I did not look like the right kind of cargo. ‘We allow passengers as a service to the residents of the smaller islands, but . . .’

I asked about the route and declared that I would get on the boat at Wini, on the East Timor border. The harbour master at Kupang looked even more dubious, but he gave me a time and a date: 10 a.m. on the ninth. And so, at about 9.30 on the ninth, I cruised down Wini’s only street and wound up at the pier. No boat at the pier, no boat anywhere on the horizon.