The newly passed Jakarta Special Administrative Law can be seen as promoting democracy in Jakarta, though only timidly, but lacks all the articles to necessary to transform Jakarta into a modern, humane metropolitan city.

The new law is sure to be more supportive of democracy than the 1999 law that it replaced. The 1999 law stipulated that the Jakarta governor and his or her deputy were elected by the Jakarta Legislative Council, or the DPRD, while the new law requires the governor and deputy to be directly elected by the people.

By adopting direct elections for governor and deputy governor, Jakarta is now on par with other provinces in the country, many of which have already had direct elections for governor and deputy governor. Unlike other regions, Jakarta sets tougher requirements for candidates to run for the governor's seat, i.e. the candidate must win at least 50 percent of the cast votes. This requirement, however, will not have any implications on the upcoming gubernatorial election as there are only two candidates running.

However, unlike other provinces, Jakarta democracy stops there. It does not go down to the municipal and regency level. Jakarta has four municipalities – North, South, East and West Jakarta – and one regency, the Thousand Islands. Even under the new law, these four mayors and one regent are still going to be appointed by the elected governor, with recommendations from the Jakarta DPRD. But the governor can ignore the recommendations.

Like other mayors and regents across the country, Jakarta's mayors and regent have a legislative council, but again, their members are selected by the Jakarta DPRD and endorsed by the governor.

When we go further down to the village level in this law, democracy seems to emerge again, although only partially. While the village heads are appointed by mayors and the regent, members of their legislative counterparts are all directly elected by the people.

Such complications in democratic practices in Jakarta, for many, can simply be tolerated because it is a special province. That's apparently one of the reasons this law exists. Most of all, people don't seem to be bothered whether their mayors and regent are elected or not. They might even not know who they are. The only leader they may know well is the governor.

We too can accept the timidity of the law in terms of promoting democracy. But we are concerned with the timidity of this law in promoting better public services and making this city a better place to live, work and play.

Unlike the autonomy laws, which decentralize power and functions to the municipality and regency level, thus bypassing the provinces, autonomy in Jakarta stops at the provincial level. The consequence is that all the money in Jakarta is going to be controlled by the governor – as is happening now – and the municipalities and the regency will not have financial independence. This practice will unfavorably affect public services as the provincial administration is just too remote from the people, especially the poor.

As if confirming the centralistic nature of this law, the law says that governors can appoint up to four deputies, on top of the elected deputy. It is not clear how the four deputies will work. It seems that such a mechanism will only create redundancies in the bureaucracy, as the Jakarta administration has many agencies, which are replicated at the municipality and regency level. The law simply has no interest in reforming the city bureaucracy.

The law, nevertheless, tries to solve the long prevailing problems of coordination with regions bordering Jakarta, especially in spatial planning, by demanding the establishment of the Inter-Regional Cooperation Agency. However, the law is again so timid in its nature that it does not give any power to this agency nor set a deadline for its establishment. The law leaves it to the administrations of Jakarta, West Java and Banten to decide on the nature of this agency.

This law focuses too much on the administration, but just ignores the people. It seems to forget the purpose of establishing a Jakarta administration, which is not only to support the governing of the unitary state of Indonesia, but most of all to serve its citizens better.

After all, it depends on the people who implement the law. It is for sure timid, but if the next governor dared enough to make a breakthrough in providing better public services, we may see a better outcome. So, let's forget the law for now and pick the best candidate for Jakarta.