Passing the test

Great nations are founded on big dreams. Today, great ideas continue to reign over the rhetoric of imagination.
Big statements and declarations issue from a country known for its potential, but rarely for its tangible accomplishments.
The past week was filled with more big dreams, contrasted with the multiple events that showed the many tripwires that will block its realization.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said that with its large potential reserves, Indonesia should hasten the development of geothermal power plants. Despite being home to 40 percent of the world’s potential geothermal energy reserves, existing geothermal power plants here produced just 1,100 megawatts, accounting for a mere 4.2 percent of the country’s estimated total geothermal energy potential reserves of 28,000 megawatts.
Twelve geothermal projects worth US$5 billion were signed on Monday. These projects are part of an $8.6 billion geothermal program to produce 2,885 megawatts of electricity.
Yudhoyono said geothermal energy, a renewable energy source, would be one of the answers to Indonesia’s energy problems and would help reduce global warming.
These developments are hopeful. It is yet another test to carry through. But grand statements have been made before, leading to disappointment and disillusion to results that often fall short of expectations.
Plagued by notoriously poor planning and a corruption-riddled mindset, many past projects have gone astray.
This week we have sadly witnessed again how our resources have for many years been depleted for personal gain, or simply lost due to careless planning and execution.
Indonesian Society of Environmental Intellectuals on Tuesday claimed that Indonesia lost Rp 300 trillion every year through environmentally unsound planning.

“While we have laws on environmental and spatial planning, the frequency of floods continues to increase. This shows there are still problems in implementation,” society secretary-general Herdianto W.K. said, referring to the 2006 Spatial Planning Law and the 2009 Environmental Protection Law. He blamed the government’s failure to translate its policies into action.
Data from the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas), for example, showed that floods caused at least Rp 100 trillion in losses per year. Jakarta suffered losses of Rp 37 trillion in the 2007 floods.
A study by Greenomics Indonesia found that forest clearing had reached alarming levels, with more than 10 million hectares of protected forest cleared for commercial use every year.
Just to compound matters, the Indonesian Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (PPATK) on Wednesday found a trend in the increase of suspected graft  in the implementation of a government campaign against illegal logging in 2005.
PPATK said it found the highest number of dubious transactions involving law enforcers — including local forestry officials — took place between 2006 and 2007.
“Since then they have declined, with less than 10 cases in 2009,” PPATK chairman Yunus Husein said.
The government said the deforestation rate was still more than 1 million hectares per year.
Failure to eradicate this culture of corruption only means that the bigger the project, the wider the financial seepage. Each day, it seems, we are faced with ever expanding news of corruption we probably knew existed but had closed our eyes to.
On Tuesday, the Corruption Court handed down a two-year prison sentence and a fine to Mardiono, a former head of the planning and budget bureau at the Health Ministry. He was found guilty of embezzlement in the procurement of health equipment for healthcenters in remote regions.
The Rp 15.7 billion procurement was estimated to have cost the state Rp 4.8 billion in losses.
The verdict came on the heels of a separate case against former health minister Ahmad Sujudi, who was handed a 27-month prison sentence.
With such evidence of poor professional and ethical standards, one can only guess the impression being made on the country’s next generation.
That one can forsake the greater good in order to get rich quick? That professionalism and hard work ultimately count for little?
Such is the chaotic nature that the country even has problems standardizing levels of quality for the national high school exams.
The National Education Ministry earlier announced that this year’s graduation rate was 89.88 percent, down from last year’s 95.05 percent. This means that up to 154,000 students across the country will have to sit remedial exams.
In fact, up to 267 senior high and vocational schools recorded a 100 percent failure rate in the recent exams, Education Minister Muhammad Nuh said.
Around 1,530,000 students took the national exams last month. Students who do not pass the exam do not qualify for higher education.
While some considered the most difficult subject of the six tested to be mathematics or English, Nuh announced Monday that most of the students taking remedial tests in May were those who failed to post a passing score in Indonesian language and biology.
On Tuesday, he said the failure rate was even higher among students who chose language as their major.
If we cannot even speak our own language properly, how can we expect to build and maintain major power plants?
— Meidyatama Suryodiningrat
opini the jakarta post 03 mei 2010