Tb. Arie Rukmantara, Jakarta – Like their counterparts on countless streets throughout the nation, the children on the corner in Pejompongan, Central Jakarta, regularly show up every day to beg for money from motorists. But they have been absent from school for years, if they ever attended.
"No school is free here. I can't afford it," said a street child, nicknamed "Boy", who would be a third-year elementary school student now. Without the ability to read and write, his future is far grimmer and shorter than other Indonesians.
There are an estimated 15 million illiterate people in Indonesia and although others are better off than Boy, higher education remains out of reach for the majority of Indonesians, teachers are still poorly trained and school buildings are always in disrepair. Meanwhile, the government says it cannot afford to renovate some 8,000 damaged schools across the country.
Angered by successive governments' lack of political will to fix this problem, two groups of educators, the Indonesian Teachers Association (PGRI) and the Association of Indonesian Teacher Graduates (ISPI), are calling on the Constitutional Court to do something about it.
They want the court to again review Law No. 13/2005 on the 2006 state budget, which allocates only 8 percent of the budget to education, far less than the mandatory, and its critics say unrealistic, 20 percent stipulated in the Constitution.
"The government has violated the Constitution by earmarking only 8 percent of the state budget for education and therefore the (budget) law must be overturned," PGRI chairman Rusli Yunus said after the first hearing at the Constitutional Court on Friday.
Rusli said Rp 31 trillion rupiah ($US3.3 billion) was not enough to spend on the nation's future.
"How can you send more than two million children to school and fix over 8,000 damaged schools with that amount of money?" Rusli said. The ideal amount should reach Rp 87 trillion – 20 percent of the budget, he said.
Last October, the same court issued a verdict ordering the government to set a minimum of 20 percent of the state budget to fund national education.
However, the government defied the order, saying that meeting the minimum threshold would raise the risk of widening the budget deficit. The 2006 deficit is projected to reach about 0.7 percent of the total.
The court's panel of three judges, led by I Dewa Gede Palguna later ruled the teachers could continue their case against the government after submitting a thorough report on the projected financial losses to the nation cause by low budget allocations.
Former education minister Wardiman Djojonegoro, who was among those filing the request for a judicial review, said he and other educators would not stop putting pressure on the government to fulfill its constitutional mandate.
"Should this court verdict fail again to force the government to revise the state budget allocation for education, we will continue to take it to court every year until the government has carried out the mandate entrusted to it," he said.
Soedijarto, of the Association of Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals (ICMI), said the government could no longer use the same old argument that it had no extra money to fund education.
"After studying the state budget, I learned that the government could minimize other spending, such as cutting down spending on foreign debt payments by asking for a debt moratorium, he said.
Lawmaker Heri Akhmadi said before the state budget draft was submitted to the House of Representatives, several legislators had formally asked the President to allocate a minimum of 20 percent from the state budget to education.
"But somehow (legislators) did not take that note into account," he said, adding that Golkar was among the parties that rejected the note.