The future’s bright for Indonesia

“WE were sitting over our first gin-tonics at the big circular bar in the centre of the room, and Wally swivelled his twenty-two stone around to peer at two figures who had halted inside the entrance.

“The Hotel Indonesia in Jakarta was managed by an American airline, and the Wayang Bar followed the American practice and sealed itself against all natural light.”

This observation is by “Cookie”, a news agency reporter, the narrator in Christopher Koch’s novel, The Year of Living Dangerously. The 1978 novel is a semi-fictionalised account of events in Indonesia leading to a coup intended to topple then president Sukarno on Sept 30, 1965.

Two days after the Indo-nesian presidential election on Valentine’s Day this year, I recreated this scene without Wally and the other characters in the lounge bar of what is now one of the most iconic luxury hotels in Jakarta, Hotel Indonesia Kempinski Jakarta.

Sipping gin and tonic, I was rereading the novel and simultaneously diving into a nonfiction book titled The End of Sukarno (1968) by John Hughes, a journalist who covered the downfall of Sukarno and the rise of Suharto.

The two books make for fascinating reading about Indonesia’s past at that time. President Sukarno, in his 1964 Independence Day speech, used the Italian phrase “vivere pericoloso” (living dangerously) as its title.

It was also the year of living dangerously for Malaysia, newly formed on Sept 16, 1963. Sukarno was planning to “Ganyang Malaysia” (Crush Malaysia).

“We were all pretty much convinced, in the Wayang that evening, that what this signalled was Indonesia’s total commitment to a ‘Jakarta-Peking axis’, and the long-threatened military invasion of Malaysia; and we were in that state of vicarious excitement over a possible international apocalypse, which is a journalist’s drug,” narrates Cookie.

As a journalist, it would have been THE geopolitical event to cover. But since that is the past, covering the 2024 Indonesian Presidential Election was the journalist’s “drug” for me.

Fast forward from 1964 to 2024, and politically, Indonesia is much more stable now.

There was an election. As predicted, the result is the continuation of former president Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s 10-year rule, with anointed successor Pra-bowo Subianto winning the presidency with his running mate, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, Jokowi’s 36-year-old son.

It will be business-politics as usual in the fourth most populous country in the world. Indonesia is also the biggest Muslim majority country, with 87% of its 279 million people being adherents of Islam.

With such political continuity – whether good or bad depending on who you ask – it is now Malaysia that is living dangerously compared with its abang (Malaysia has always been the younger brother in the abang-adik, or older-younger brother, relationship with Indonesia).

Politically, Malaysia been unstable since the fall of Barisan Nasional after six decades in power at the 14th General Election in 2018. We then began changing governments and prime ministers faster than Zara changes its seasonal designs.

Indonesia’s big pride is that it will be an economic superpower in the near future.

Google “When will Indonesia become an economic power?”

One of the answers, from the Financial Times no less, is: “Indonesia is set to be the sixth-largest economy in the world by 2027.”

Three more years to become the sixth-largest economy in the world? But there is a visible contradiction in the heart of Jakarta’s business and administrative centre that introduces some doubt. Within a 1km radius of Hotel Indonesia and the high-end Plaza Indonesia, there are squatter houses. I could see the poverty from the window of the taxi taking me to the lap of luxury.

These poverty-stricken people are the marhean, a name explained by a character in Koch’s novel: “And you [Sukarno] tell how you realised that although a landowner, although not a member of the proletariat that has to sell its labour, this typical Javanese farmer was in fact a pauper,” says Billy, an Australian/Indonesian journalist.

“You asked his name, and he told you ‘Marhaen’. And you used this name for the poor landowning peasants of Indo-nesia, on whom the nation’s well-being depended, and whose voice you would be. Remain their voice, Bung Karno – never forget little Marhaen!”

Unlike Kuala Lumpur, which is almost devoid of squatter homes, sprawling Jakarta has pockets of them. In Glodok (Chinatown), in JakSel (Jakarta Selatan, the city’s cool area).

Will these marhaen prosper when Indonesia becomes an economic superpower?

I asked some of them when I was on a political tourism visit to cover the presidential election earlier. For them, presidents come and go, but their lives will still be the same: drowning in poverty.

But don’t get me wrong.

You can feel the money – serious money – when you go to certain parts of the bigger Indonesian cities like Jakarta, Surabaya, Semarang and Bandung. And, of course, if you only experience places like Hotel Indonesia.

The country is booming. And one of the reasons for this is political stability.

After quick count results indicated two weeks ago that Prabowo had won the presidency in one round (if there’s no clear winner, Indonesian elections go into a second round), the media reported: “Indonesia is expected to see a surge of capital inflows in the coming months after Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto took a strong lead in the preliminary results of the presidential race, as investors perceive the outcome as continuity of the current government, which is deemed good for business.”

Would you want to invest your US dollars in a country with revolving-door prime ministers?