Victor Tjahjadi, Jakarta – Indonesia has sought to reassure investors attending a key infrastructure summit that the government is fighting hard to end corruption and slash red tape in Southeast Asia's largest economy.
Hundreds of foreign and domestic investors have been attending the event at which 111 projects worth 19.1 billion dollars are being offered in an urgent bid to rejuvenate the nation's crumbling infrastructure.
Vice president Jusuf Kalla said regular media reports of arrests of corrupt officials were evidence that the government was serious about tackling entrenched graft. "I don't know (if) your countries are (doing) something like that. Maybe the corruption level in your country is low. We are working hard (on) that," Kalla said.
Kalla told delegates that efforts to improve the huge bureaucracy's efficiency were also forging ahead. "I know that the bureaucracy is slowly moving. That's why we have many reforms of the law to make the bureaucracy work well," he said. "We will deliver confidence to anybody who will be starting business in Indonesia," he pledged.
Analysts had warned ahead of the summit that enthusiasm to stump up funds by investors could be tempered by Indonesia's ingrained culture of corruption and lack of efficiency.
While China and India have been enjoying huge attention from investors, Indonesia – the world's fourth most populous nation – has languished on their radar screen, partly due to its poor infrastructure in the first place.
State enterprises minister Sugiharto said the president had sent a clear message that all state officials must improve their work ethic or face dismissal.
"In the coming three years, for those bureaucrats who cannot follow the patterns handed down by the president to the ministers and first echelon officials, we are going to carry out leadership reforms at the lower levels," he told a press conference.
He cited two recent presidential instructions aimed at trimming down red tape on electricity projects as an example. Under these regulations, Sugiharto said, the process of starting project tenders to signing a deal which used to take more than 800 days to complete has been reduced to 12 months. "No slippage can be tolerated, otherwise we will be experiencing power shortages in 2009," the minister said.
Indonesia's is already experiencing alarming energy shortfalls despite the archipelago's vast resources of oil, natural gas and geothermal energy.
On Wednesday, Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono also moved to assure investors that Jakarta could provide a stable environment for their funds. He said the nation needed some 22 billion dollars per year to devote to infrastructure over the next few years.
Dimitri Pantazaras, a participant from a Bahrain-based private equity fund investor, said that one problem Indonesia faced was a lack of "projects that are properly prepared and equipped with sound feasibility studies. There are not enough feasibility studies for these projects, but I'm sure the government is committed in making these reforms happen," he said.
Indonesia held its first infrastructure summit early last year, soliciting bids for 91 projects worth 22.5 billion dollars. Only nine deals however have since been secured.