HS Dillon, Jakarta – To the country's first president, Sukarno, freedom was political independence in its entirety. However, recognizing full well that it would take a long journey before the "statement" of political independence became a "living reality", the proclaimer likened "free" or "freedom" to a golden bridge.
On that long journey, Sukarno reminded us that: "In this free Indonesia we have to free our people! In this free Indonesia, we have to free the heart of our nation!" (Sukarno, June 1, 1945).
This description of the mile posts to be passed carries with it an obligation to free the entire Indonesian population in mind and body, including from the shackles of the islander inferiority complex. The first paragraph from the preamble of the 1945 Constitution which reads: "... thus imperialism should be abolished from the world because it is incompatible with the essence of humanity and justice", emphasizes that there would be no room in a free Indonesia for those inheriting the colonialist's greed.
Since the beginning of the republic, we had begun to enhance the bargaining position of farm laborers and peasants by, inter alia, establishing the Agrarian Committee in 1948. However, even though colonialist assets came to be nationalized, beneficiaries of the inherited inequality successfully blocked the implementation of both the Basic Law for Profit Sharing and the Basic Law for Agrarian Reform.
Decades later, it seemed as if President Soeharto suddenly woke up to the inequality being spawned by his market fundamentalism. He rounded up the conglomerates on his Tapos farm and tried to convince them that improved inequality would help ensure more sustainable development.
Unfortunately, the "Frankenstein Conglomerates", who had amassed great riches under Soeharto's patronage, managed to thwart their creator's wishes to distribute 15 percent of their shares to both their rank and file and senior staff.
How does Indonesia, as a people and as a nation, look on the eve of it's 64th year of independence? Although reassuring statistics abound, it is evident that poverty has become a fact of life for citizens such as landless farmers, farm laborers, factory laborers, fishing hands, small fishermen, sidewalk vendors, the unemployed and other such marginalized groups.
One of the hears heart-wrenching stories such as the one about a father who walked around for days with his baby's corpse in his arms because he couldn't afford to give it a decent burial. Unperturbed, the glittering lifestyles of "pseudo-Indonesians" trying hard to keep abreast of their overseas counterparts in accumulation and conspicuous consumption, continue apace.
Such happenings are commonplace not only in the big cities, but are brought to the remote corners of the archipelago by the mass media. It is hard to deny that it is precisely our acts and omissions which have paved the way for the inter-generational transmission of inequality and persistent poverty.
Peter Boomgaard, a Dutchman, described early 19th century Java as a picture of poverty and helplessness. Ahmad Arif, a journalist who compiled the expedition report Highway Post, 200 Years of Debilitation a year ago sadly concluded that two hundred years, on that bleak picture remains.
This greater continuity than change becomes even more incomprehensible, as one of our leading economists had estimated it would have taken a mere 5 percent of the incomes of the top 20 percent of the country's taxpayers to close the poverty-gap in 2001.
The paramount lesson to be gleaned from the brutal reality of this "Freedom Impoverished" is that we have to immediately abandon the inhumane trickledown paradigm. This paradigm condones the better off appropriating the lion's share of benefits, allowing very little to "trickle-down" to the majority.
It is time we adopted a development paradigm according primacy to equality and social justice, one I always refer to as people-driven development. This paradigm mandates that our development path follow the growth-through-equity sequencing.
The ensuing strategy would call for the employment of four policy tools namely assets, access, income and voice, in concert. In such a case, Agrarian Reform entailing the redistribution of land to subsistence farmers and greatly improving their access to credit, would comprise the best platform for reinforcing our efforts to improve income and give voice to the silenced.
Such a new equilibrium of wealth and political power would go a long way towards strengthening our sense of citizenship. By encouraging and enforcing meaningful participation in decision-making processes, especially those entwined with their common future, our citizens should be able to build better social cohesion and gain the political legitimacy required to fight entrenched interests. Such empowered citizenry would then serve as the main driver for the transformation needed to break this chain of trans-generational impoverishment, a sine qua non to establishing social equality for everyone.
The choice is clear: There is no middle ground! We can either continue this culture of self-deceit, and keep on denying that the "reality" facing the poor today has been brought upon them through "indigenization of colonization" by our own ruling elite, or we can turn to our conscience and revisit our vow "For thee, my country, our soul and body".
Attuning to our conscience will help us overcome greed and curb conspicuous consumption, and transcend our differences to marshal all funds and forces to help our fellow countrymen break free from the fetters of poverty. History shall record whether we had the moral courage to take the road less traveled.
[The writer was head of the National Agency for the Coordination of Poverty Alleviation, 2001.]