Bagus BT Saragih, Jakarta – The Indonesia-Singapore bilateral meeting on Tuesday included the signing of agreements at the ministerial level, but one of the Indonesian ministers said he did not know the substance of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) he and his counterpart just signed.
Education and Culture Minister M. Nuh and his Singaporean counterpart, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Law K. Shanmugam, signed "The cooperation in the field of Education" agreement.
Consecutively, Administrative Reforms Minister Azwar Abubakar and Shanmugam signed an agreement titled "Technical cooperation on Capacity Building for Public Officials".
The agreements were made on the sidelines of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and visiting Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's leaders' retreat meeting at the Bogor Presidential Palace in Bogor, West Java. Both state leaders witnessed the signings.
While the agreement title was self-explanatory, Azwar could not answer journalists' questions about the contents of the agreement he just signed.
Azwar, who oversees bureaucratic reform and is tasked with boosting the quality of the nation's administrative sector, admitted that he did not scrutinize the document before signing it. "I will answer in two or three days. I have to study it first because I did not read [the MoU] article by article," Azwar said.
"The point is that Singapore has much better public servants, and the country is not far from here," said the National Mandate Party (PAN) politician who was installed as a minister just five months ago.
When asked if the agreement would include cooperation such as the exchange of civil servants on study programs, Azwar said, "I do not know yet what forms the ties were [in the agreement]". Unlike Azwar, Nuh could elaborate on the Singapore-Indonesia education agreement.
He said the deal included the exchange of university professors. "It also includes a mutual understanding that the degrees held by Indonesian university graduates will be recognized by Singapore and vice versa," he said.
Indonesian students will also be given greater access to study and conduct research in the city-state, Nuh added. "We also encourage Singaporean students to study here." (nvn)