Morgan Mellish – On the main road into Jayapura, a large two-storey building is being erected – the bureaucrats of Papua's provincial capital are upgrading themselves to better lodgings.
For decades, Indonesia's central government neglected Papua. Now, a lot of funds are flowing into the country's second-poorest province. But not much is reaching the people.
"Where the money is going is easy to answer," says Paul Sutmuller, head of the United Nations Papua development program. "Everywhere, government departments are moving into new buildings.
"I'm not saying those new offices mightn't be necessary. But you could argue: Why do you start with improving your own businesses before you improve the living conditions of the people?"
Over the years, huge tax revenues flowed to Jakarta from the massive Freeport copper and gold mine near Timika – up to $1 billion a year – but much of that was simply pocketed by the regime of corrupt former dictator Soeharto.
The years of neglect left their mark. Nearly 40 per cent of the province's population – twice the national average – live below the poverty line. This, and widespread human rights abuses by the Indonesian security forces, are the causes of Papua's political unrest.
But Jakarta's financial neglect, at least, has stopped. Following the 2000 enactment of special autonomy laws – which granted more powers and funds to the troubled province – the federal money coming in has skyrocketed.
Papua's per capita revenue was under 300,000 rupiah ($44) in 1999, the year after Soeharto was ousted. But it jumped to nearly 800,000 rupiah in 2003 and is now substantially higher than that.
"The statement [Jakarta] is exploiting Papua financially is very incorrect, now at least," says World Bank senior economist Wolfgang Fengler.
"That has lots of implications. It means putting more money in is not the answer. If you talk to the new Governor, he's very blunt. He says, 'We don't need money, we need people who can help us use the money well'."
Like the rest of Indonesia, part of Papua's problem is simply a cumbersome bureaucracy. A recent UNDP study found more than 50 per cent of local government revenues were spent on "operational expenditure".
On top of this, it can take up to eight months to prepare the provincial budget, leaving only a few months to actually spend the money. "The planning and budgeting cycle takes half a year and sometimes more," says Sutmuller. "Last year, they had just four months to spend the budget."
To overcome this, Papua's new Governor, Barnabas Suebu, is proposing to partly bypass district and local governments and hand money directly to the villages. Under this reform, he will distribute $15,000 to each of the province's 3805 villages.
"We will deliver funds and services directly to the people," Suebu says. "We will save money at the top levels [of the bureaucracy] so services can touch the people directly."
This has been welcomed by groups such as UNDP but nobody expects it to completely solve the dilemma of how to raise standards of living. Part of the problem is the area's geography. For starters, there are hardly any roads, meaning most goods are delivered by plane, vastly increasing costs. A bag of cement, for example, costs the equivalent of $8 in Jayapura, $54 in Wamena in the central highlands and a massive $180 in the even more remote township of Mulia.
Part of the solution, some believe, is more foreign investment. Freeport, which accounts for about half of the province's gross domestic product, has been able to operate here profitably, although controversially, since the late 1960s. But virtually no other large Western companies have been brave enough to try.
Only BP has made a significant investment. It is building a $6.6 billion liquefied natural gas project at Bintuni Bay in the province's east. But nobody expects BP to have an easy time.
"[Investment] has got to be attractive to the foreign company, to the national and provincial governments and to the people who surround it," says the World Bank's country director for Indonesia, Andrew Steer.
"Getting all of those right is very hard. If BP can't do it, it's certainly not for want of trying. But if the company succeeds, it will attract others of its calibre and that really matters."