Indonesia’s Living Sea Wall Parable: The Government Prioritizes Giving Permission than Giving Solutions
By Ezaridho Ibnutama,
Austrian Economist
INVESTORTRUST.ID - Large speculation has been made of who made the sea wall, and the government has been searching nonstop to put the blame. Many netizens have pointed fingers to Agung Sedayu Group’s Aguan to be responsible for creating the sea wall to protect his Pantai Indah Kapuk (PIK) construction project from the rising sea level. It does not matter who made it. He or she should be hailed as a hero.
The government has planned to destroy the sea wall despite being an infrastructure of good to combat the aforementioned problem of the rising sea level in North Jakarta. The government is quick to point fingers and save face over their lack of action on the problem.
In every regional Jakarta election for the past cycles, many candidates have promised to create a sea wall. One of them being Ridwan Kamil during the 2024 Jakarta gubernatorial election. And Prabowo Subianto has also said that the capital should be moved because the water rising from North Jakarta during the 2024 presidental election. Suffice to say, this has been a major political talking point.
However, when a private individual (no matter who he or she is), has taken his or her private money, resources, time, and effort to enact a solution to help the Northern Jakarta to be spared from inevitable flooding, the government could not embrace and celebrate it, but the government becomes resentful because they have lost a political talking point to garner support to be elected.
Baca Juga
More to the point, a government should be promoting and rewarding people to give major solutions to the country by their own individual efforts. People taking matters into their own hands without going through bureaucratic procedure should be celebrated.
The fact there is a controversy shows the utter corruption of the Indonesian government that does not pull up the greatness of individual merit of service, but push them down to prioritise the churning of permission slips that crushes the solution-producing citizens. Once the solutions are given and implement but do not get permission, the government goes on the offensive and destroys the solution and ask the solution-provider to get permission first then do it again.
How will a country progress in that type of system when good solutions are deconstructed then built again just because a permission is given or not? Lockean Property Rights argues that any material object not being in use can be fairly claimed as a property by anyone if it is transformed to be a utility. The area where the sea wall stands was not being utilized and was a detriment to the people living in the area due to the encroaching, heightening waves.
Baca Juga
It is inconceivable that the only people able to get away with doing grand gestures to solutions should be the political or politically-adjacent class. Friedrich Hayek (was an Austrian-born British academic who contributed to political economy, political philosophy and intellectual history) has called random formations of human systems (political, religious, or commerce) to be “Spontaneous Order”. Any system can be manifested by a group of people. Just as the sea wall was raised as an infrastructural issue spontaneously out of nowhere, it was a spontaneous solution to a growing problem. And it is simply an economic as much as it is a social or political product from people of initiative borne out of negligence and broken promises by elected officials.
The moral of the parable: In a technocratic bureaucracy obsessed with debate and with a nonstop-talk-therapy, passing out permission slips is more crucial than passing out solutions. ***