Plans are afoot in Indonesia to move the seat of government out of its burgeoning national capital, Jakarta, which has turned into a sweltering, steaming, heaving mass of some 28 million people packed into a vast urban sprawl.
President Joko Widodo said on Tuesday that the country was seriously contemplating shifting government functions away from South-East Asia’s most populous city which is bursting at the seams with more than 10 million and a metropolitan area that is three times bigger.
His $33bn proposal comes just two weeks after Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world and South-East Asia’s largest economy, witnessed presidential and parliamentary elections with results expected on May 22.
Widodo told local media that he was examining three cities away from the archipelago’s main island of Java for the new capital but did not name them though he said he had been visiting these cities continuously for the past three years.
“In Java, the population is 57 per cent of the total for Indonesia, or more than 140 million people, to the point that the ability to support this, whether in terms of the environment, water or traffic in the future, will no longer be possible so I decided to move outside Java,” he told journalists.
However, if a government official is to be believed, the three cities whose names are doing the rounds in the corridors of power are Palangka Raya, Tanah Bumbu and Penajam, all on the island of Borneo. He said more details could be disclosed in a development plan once the election results were announced.
According to the World Economic Forum, the Big Durian, already brought to standstill by traffic snarls, is also sitting on a swampy piece of land at just 8 metres above sea level, with parts of it sinking fast. At the current rate, 95 per cent of north Jakarta will be under water by 2050, affecting 1.8 million people.
Palangka Raya, a city of 200,000 people, has been named in the past as a potential alternative to the megapolis. It was designed in the 1950s by Sukarno, Indonesia’s founding president and an architect, who intended it to become the new national capital.
But critics wonder whether the move to dump Jakarta, one of Asia’s most lively global cities, should be an urgent priority for Indonesia, saying that shifting the capital may help broaden growth across the archipelago of about 17,000 islands, but the plan lacks enough concrete details to be taken seriously yet.
Chatib Basri, former finance minister and now lecturer at the University of Indonesia, admitted that the idea was worth considering given the fact that several countries had split government and business capitals, such as Australia, the US and Kazakhstan.
But he pointed to more pressing challenges, such as boosting annual gross domestic product growth which was largely stuck at about 5 per cent during Mr Widodo’s first term, adding that there was also the question of cost. “How do we finance this?” he asked, saying it was unrealistic to expect the private sector to support the move as companies were unlikely to move their headquarters away from Jakarta.
Douglas Ramage, managing director at consultancy Bower Group Asia in Jakarta, said that such a move was more “aspirational” than realistic. “We are years away from having the right infrastructure and the right legislative and regulatory changes that would be necessary to support a serious move of the capital,” he said.
There has to be “more evidence of serious intent and planning” before a serious thought is given to move the seat of government away from country’s economic, cultural and political centre, said Ben Bland, director of the south-east Asia project at the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based think-tank. “It looks like it’s a distraction from the debate about the election results and an attempt to reassert presidential authority,” he added.
Unofficial counts by mainstream pollsters, meanwhile, show Mr Widodo is set to beat former general Prabowo Subianto by about 10 percentage points. Mr Prabowo has refused to concede defeat, alleging electoral irregularities and arguing that he has won about 62 per cent of the vote based on his team’s internal counting.