The Many Faces of Poverty in Indonesia

By Barrie | August 22nd, 2007 | No Comments

Intuition many hold that pluralism in society is a destabilizing factor for democracy. There seems to be only so much diversity a society can handle. Many Indonesians fear that ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious plurality could cause disintegration or even “balkanization”.

In recent years violence has occurred in Aceh, Poso, Ambon, Papua, Bali and Jakarta — this list is indeed long.

Secular Indonesians fear that applying (parts) of sharia in some cities, for example, endangers inclusive citizenship as enshrined in the 1945 Constitution.

Religious people, on the other side, fear that sexed-up trash on TV will morally corrupt the young.

While discussions on Islam, Pancasila and secularism are important for the future of Indonesia’s democracy, there is another more pressing problems: structural poverty.

All this talk about public morality seems to obscure the economic fact that 100 million Indonesians have to live on Rp 20,000 (about US$2) a day, and 10 million of them on less than Rp 10,000 per day (these numbers are from the World Bank; see www.worldbank.org/id

The differences between Muslims and non-Muslims, or religious people and secularists are not as important as the gap between the rich and the poor. It is this gap that could endanger the democratization of this country. Can a democracy flourish when such huge inequality persists?

It is possible with Rp 20,000 a day to get enough food to live. But living is more than eating.

For the poor their situation becomes much like a curse, which stays in the family for at least seven generations, because it is impossible to educate their children. Public education is still very expensive, despite the government’s continuous efforts to allocate more money for the sector.

Housing is also complex. As architect John Turner once said: “Housing is a verb.” There are many trade-offs to be dealt with. Illegal settlements are seldom free. These settlements are illegal because the occupants lack land tenure — and thus the legal security that comes with it — but the occupants have to pay “rent” to get an informal form of safety.

And the farther away from a city center the cheaper housing is, the more money has to be spent on transportation. Sometimes it is easier to sleep in the open air, close to — possible — jobs.

Toll roads, high-rise apartment buildings and malls are seen as essential parts of modern life. Urban kampungs have been and are being demolished to make way for these developments. These urban settlements are seen by the rich as the sour spots of a city, and modernization is used as justification for their demolition.

Is the (global) market the only answer? And what is then the role of the Indonesian state? The language of the market sounds fair: you will have a chance to succeed if you use your talents and work hard. In short, meritocracy.

Meritocracy is a society where socio-economic status is derived from one’s own efforts and capabilities. In such a society one should not get rich because of one’s family name, or skin color, or religion, or place of birth or party membership.

In Indonesia, though, unemployment (masked by underemployment) is so massive that a meritocratic is simply unfeasible. Even with good macro-economic prospects most Indonesians will not enjoy the — literal — fruits of these prospects. This leads to a widening gap between the rich and the poor, and it can also lead to conflicts (for instance the returning occurrence of anti-Chinese violence).

Not all poor are, of course, jobless. A job is no guarantee that one can escape poverty. A poor person with talent will have difficulty prospering. It will be very hard to leave the kampung behind. If the ideal of meritocracy is the hard currency it will seem as if poverty is one’s own fault: One is just too lazy to make use of one’s own capacities. But without networks one cannot advance. It is easy to stigmatize the poor, and to see them as an amorphous mass that can be pushed around.

Poverty is indeed a major threat to democracy, perhaps even more than fundamentalism.

The writer (Roy Voragen) lives in Jakarta and teaches philosophy at Parahyangan University, Bandung.

His blog can be accessed at http://fatumbrutum.blogspot.com/.