Indonesia's powerful provincial governors will soon undergo regular performance reviews as part of the government's push for bureaucratic reforms nationwide, the head of the presidential delivery unit said on Tuesday.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono set up the new unit after his re-election last year, picking trusted technocrat Kuntoro Mangkusubroto to tackle the many deterrents to foreign investment in Southeast Asia's biggest economy, ranging from woefully inadequate infrastructure to red tape.
Mangkusubroto told reporters Yudhoyono already receives monthly reports on the performance of government ministers and weekly updates on broader progress.
Such performance checks will be extended in June to provincial governors, who are elected, as part of a push for widespread bureaucratic reform. "Every milestone we will measure, and if there's a miss, you will have to explain," he said.
Mangkusubroto and the delivery unit have been tasked with addressing many of the issues which deter investment, curb economic growth, and hinder Indonesia's goal of obtaining an investment grade sovereign credit rating.
Such issues include power shortages, poor infrastructure, an unpredictable legal system and bureaucracy. "The challenge of this country is to get 2,000 trillion rupiah ($216.1 billion) in investment every year. That's the only way we can achieve 7 to 8 percent economic growth by the year 2014," Mangkusubroto said.
Investors often complain that, in some parts of the sprawling archipelago, decentralization has led to conflicting local and central government regulations, and created more red tape and more opportunities for corruption.
Mangkusubroto said that Indonesian ministers, for the first time, were now subject to performance contracts to ensure government policy was properly implemented. "A performance contract is nothing new in corporate life. But for Indonesia, that's really something," he said.
The presidential delivery unit presents reports on ministerial performance to the cabinet every 25 days and Yudhoyono is briefed weekly in a newly created "situation room".
Mangkusubroto, a former minister who was in charge of the reconstruction of Sumatra's Aceh province after the devastating tsunami in 2004, also heads a special legal reform taskforce.
Last year, the taskforce said it would help the tax office to investigate alleged tax evasion by plantations firm Asian Agri Group. The firm said it would cooperate fully with the investigation. Mangkusubroto said he expected the case to reach the courts this year.
His taskforce has received more than 1,600 detailed reports from the public on cases of corruption in the legal system, one of which led to a surprise raid on a prison where the taskforce discovered wealthy inmates living in luxury cells.