Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (33 page)

When a dog began to sniff around the biggest fish, still sitting on the scales, the ethnic Chinese buyer yelled at her staff: ‘Come on, get that on ice or it will be C-grade before it gets to Manado.’ The boys lifted it off the scales, slipped it into a Styrofoam box, and dumped some thousand-a-piece ice bricks around it. The fish would wait for the night ferry to Manado. From there it would be flown to Bali or Jakarta, because that’s where the companies with the export permits are – a product of a customs and excise system that gives big firms close to the central government the right to ship things out of Indonesia. The fish would change hands again, and eventually be loaded onto a cargo flight to Tokyo, this time properly chilled. A fish that Jongky catches will spend a minimum of three or four days surrounded by melting ice-sacks and losing value, and another two days at least in cold store before it gets to market.

Unless he opts to break the law, and make a run to the Philippines.

Sometimes, he does exactly that. So do most other fishermen in Sangihe. Later that evening, I walked northwards along the coast, past dozens of grasshopper outriggers big and small, all pulled up above the waterline. I met a fisherman who had just come in and was lashing his boat to a coconut tree. ‘Good trip?’ I asked. He beamed: ‘Seven tuna’. I asked if I could have a look at them but he said I was too late. ‘I sold them over there,’ he said, and jutted his chin out to the open sea.

‘Over there’ is General Santos – GenSan to the locals – a major port city in the southern Philippines. ‘Over there’, fishermen get paid three times as much as they do in Sangihe. The fisherman showed me the Philippine flag that he keeps for his illegal runs. Then he took me through the maths: seven fish, around forty-five kilos each. It cost him an extra million rupiah’s worth of petrol, an extra sixteen or seventeen hours of open sea journey each way. By selling in the Philippines, he made an extra US$1,600 on the trip. ‘I’d be stupid not to sell over there,’ the fisherman said. ‘But it’s a shame for Indonesia. The country is losing so much income by not paying fishermen higher prices.’

Even before the headache of export permits, there’s local paperwork to do. ‘In the Philippines, you go and get the guy out of bed and he comes in his shorts and types three lines and you’ve got what you need,’ said one wholesaler. ‘Here, we have to wait until Monday morning, then sit in the office from eight o’clock until the guy shows up, in his uniform of course, at around eleven, and all the time the value of the fish is falling.’ Even more important, he said, was infrastructure. In the Philippines there is a dedicated tuna-export processing port, built with the help of the Japanese taxpayer. Private companies have built docks and their own cold storage plants as well. Exporters charter cargo flights from GenSan, the wholesaler said. ‘You pull up at the dock, they put the fish straight in to cold store, they do the paperwork and it’s on its way to Tokyo.’

There’s no doubt that Indonesia’s infrastructure is in a parlous state. It’s the largest country in the world to consist entirely of islands, yet the World Economic Forum ranked it 104 out of 139 countries for its port infrastructure; even landlocked countries such as Zimbabwe, Switzerland and Botswana reported better access to ports. It did nearly as badly on roads, air transport and electricity.
*

It’s hamstrung in part by decentralization, which has created a war of egos. Individual districts can’t afford huge investments in things like ports or railways, so they need to club together. But no bupati wants to put his own district’s money on the table for a port which provides jobs and bragging rights for some other district, and provincial governors can’t bribe them to, because they’ve got so little cash of their own to bring to the table.

In its airily vague economic Master Plan, the central government dreams that half of the money Indonesia needs to pour into infrastructure over the next decade – some 90 billion dollars’ worth – will come from private investors, despite a dodgy legal system, capricious export rules and price-limits that bring in votes for politicians but make it nearly impossible for companies to turn a profit. Over the course of my travels in Indonesia, I spent hundreds of hours burning up fuel in intercity minibuses, not getting from A to B, but just driving around town for an hour or two before departure, looking for extra passengers. With subsidized petrol then at just 4,500 rupiah a litre, bus drivers didn’t have to worry too much that they’d burn up more in fuel than they’d make in extra fares.
*

Households pay less for their electricity than it costs to generate it. In places with twenty-four-hour electricity, Indonesians seem to leave the TV on permanently and the lights on all night, if not in the bedroom itself, then certainly in the sitting room and on the veranda. The fear of ghosts outweighs the price of electricity.

Power is subsidized for domestic consumers, not for industry, so the money the government shells out does little to create jobs or stimulate the economy. Through energy subsidies, the government is channelling a fifth of its total spending into the pockets of middle-class people with cars, air-conditioners and microwaves. Every mention of a price hike brings people out onto the streets and revives the ghosts of 1998, when a demo about rising fuel prices spiralled into the nationwide protests that brought down Suharto. What private company would step into that market?

Private companies are right to be wary. At least since the days of the Dutch VOC traders, the political Powers That Be have stuck their oar into every aspect of production and trade in these islands. The colonial government let private companies run the plantations but they essentially dictated what crops would be grown, and often what price would be paid. Sukarno tried to use the constitution to write the private sector out of the economy.
*
And Suharto was paternalistic to his fingertips. It happens that he chose to turn the economy over to a group of people who tried to cut through red tape rather than to impose it. Culturally, however, Indonesia’s bureaucrats still feel they have a right to meddle in the market at will.

In early 2013, nationalists in the government hoped to make themselves popular with farmers by banning the import of a long list of fruit and vegetables including garlic.

If the people who had slapped the list together had spoken to any farmers, or indeed to any importers, they might have discovered that Indonesia grows just 13,000 of the 400,000 tonnes of garlic it eats each year. But they didn’t do this basic homework. The price of garlic tripled in the fortnight after the ban. The result: a handful of happy farmers, and tens of millions of furious housewives.

Some business people chide their colleagues for whining too much about bureaucratic meddling and red tape. Take Ade, for example, a Chinese Indonesian born in Lombok whom I had met in Waikabubak, in West Sumba. He was a locksmith; the police had dropped me, Jerome and our still-locked motorbike at his shop after they had rescued us from the jousting fields. Ade has lived round and about Indonesia: Surabaya, Bali, even Biak in faraway Papua, he’s traded vanilla with Madagascar and cloves around the world. ‘Indonesia’s a really easy place to do business,’ he said. ‘If you’ve got an idea, you can just get on and make it happen.’

What about all the red tape, all the permits, all the fees? ‘Those come later,’ Ade said. If he gets asked to show his permit early on he simply explains that he’s just trying out the business, he doesn’t yet know if it will succeed. If it flies, he tells the authorities, then he’ll get all the permits he needs. ‘Everyone’s fine with that.’ A friend of mine who runs a dive resort agreed. I ran into her by chance at an airport in early 2012, when she was on her way to sort out building permits for the resort. Were they expanding? I asked. No, these were the permits for the existing bungalows, the ones built six years previously.

Ade was the only locksmith in western Sumba. Mostly, he said, the cops come to him when there’s been a robbery, to ask if anyone had had keys cut recently. Ade imports cloves when the local market is short. He also repairs refrigerators and radios and is the only person in the west of Sumba licensed to sell guns and ammunition; there’s a rifle stuck up on the wall of his general store, between the fishing nets, the slabs of Fanta and the piles of disposable nappies.

‘All you have to do to make money in Indonesia is to figure out what no one else is doing,’ Ade said. It made me think of how often I had noticed copy-cat businesses in smaller Indonesian towns. I was caught out by it early on. In Waikabubak, for example, every third shop prints photos. Even the little tailor opposite the market has a sideline in photo printing. This made me lazy; having promised to print photos and send them to people before I left Waikabubak, I thought: I’ll do it in the next town I go to. But the next town is all pharmacies – there’s not a single photo printer. Here it’s wall-to-wall perfume sellers, there it’s all hair salons. When I commented that I thought his approach unusual in small-town Indonesia, Ade agreed. ‘People see a business doing well, and they just copy it,’ said Ade. ‘The concept of market saturation is not well understood.’

Elizabeth, baker of Christmas cookies and mother of Jongky the tuna fisherman, wanted to go to Jakarta to visit her grandson. But like many Indonesians, she was horrified at the idea of travelling alone. ‘We’ll go to Jakarta together,’ she declared one evening as I sat drinking tea at her stall.

I hadn’t really been thinking of going to Jakarta, but Elizabeth was not to be dissuaded. ‘You’re from there, and I want to go there, and we have the same name, and your grandmother bakes the same cookies, and now we’ll go to Jakarta together.’ And next thing I knew, Jongky was fussing around booking ferries and flights.

We took an overnight ferry from Sangihe to Manado, the nearest town with an airport. The
Holly Mary
(
sic
) had an upper deck of comfortable-looking cabins and a lower deck of tightly packed bunks. Out the back, stacks of tuna in styrofoam cold-chests dripped blood, blocking the passage to the communal loos.

Elizabeth and I lay side by side on our bunks and gossiped. She told me how much she was looking forward to seeing her grandson. ‘He’s my son, really.’

Very little about Indonesia’s fluid and complex family arrangements surprises me. I’ve attended the funeral of a friend’s mother, only to be introduced to her mother again weeks later, very much alive. When I raised an eyebrow, my friend quickly explained: ‘My other mother.’ People seem to move around between ‘families’ almost at will. But still, I was a bit shocked to find out that Elizabeth’s grandson was also her son.

‘No, I mean he’s not really,’ she said hurriedly, seeing my face, ‘but he feels like he is.’ Elizabeth had gone to Jakarta for the birth. ‘But his parents both work. I felt sorry for the kid. So I took him.’ The child was five weeks old. He lived with Elizabeth in Sangihe until he was eight.

At Manado airport I turned to talk to Elizabeth and realized she wasn’t with me. I saw her standing, forlorn, at the bottom of the automatic escalator; she couldn’t bring herself to step onto it. It’s not as though Elizabeth had never been out of the village before. She had been on planes, she had stayed with her sons in Jakarta. Logically, her discomfort at just about everything in Manado’s bright, modern airport made no sense. But I found myself able to sympathize. I have seen plenty of bright, modern airports, but after just five months in the slow lane of small-town Indonesia, I felt as though I had stepped backwards in time. The return to Jakarta was a jolt.