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JAKARTA - OUT for an early morning walk a few days ago, I saw an apparition: a burst of red and white sheets billowing in the wind, slowly emerging around a corner. As it came into full view, I realized what it was: a street vendor pushing a cart, selling Sang Merah-Puti - 'The Red and White', as we call our Indonesian flag.
'Ah, Aug 17 is approaching, and this must be the most nationalistic guy in Indonesia,' I chuckled to myself. I walked alongside, chatting to him. It turned out that he sells the flags just once a year and the rest of the time he sells toys. I bet he sells paper trumpets at the end of December, so the moneyed folks can usher in the New Year with loud tooting and squawking.
My once-a-year flag vendor epitomises Indonesia, which is moonlight country par excellence. Everyone has a job or two, or more. It can be a sign of need, greed or an enterprising spirit, but for the poor it's a survival skill without which they could not make ends meet, as costs of education, health, food and fuel continually rise.
Bu Tati, my masseuse, also juggles several small businesses. In the morning, she babysits for her neighbour, who runs a thriving food stall for builders, drivers and vendors. In the afternoon, she runs her little bird-food stall, as well as sells homemade popsicles to local kids. She has put her two children through school and supported the family when her husband was jobless for years. Even now, he works only sporadically and Tati remains the rice-winner.
I know of many artists - singers, actors and other showbiz people - who also supplement their income by running other businesses: selling cakes or clothes or running a food stall - even cooking the food themselves. Those with capital may open a restaurant and sometimes earn more from it than from acting. Others go into public relations, capitalising on their celebrity.
Indonesia is a rich country, we are told. Well, maybe, but it's full of poor people and the elite rip off the rest, who have no option but to take extra jobs to survive - and usually those extra jobs involve servicing the elite! So, contrary to the myth of the 'lazy native' perpetuated by foreigners, most ordinary Indonesians are in fact very hard-working.
But hard work isn't enough on its own if Indonesia is ever to stop being 'a nation of coolies', as former president Sukarno put it. The work also has to be of high quality and has to be on time - and here I come to one particular aspect of Indonesians that really is putting the brakes on our development: unreliability! Let me give you some examples of this absence of a 'track record of demonstrative predictability consistency and continuity'.
Indonesian politicians - yep, they spring to mind first. Chronic promise-breakers who so often breach their own basic codes of political or ethical (or sexual!) conduct. But that is hardly unique to Indonesia, any more than is the vulture-like, opportunistic and manipulative behaviour of our mass media.
And our government? Let me cite what my local sate ayam (chicken kebab) man said to me while votes were being counted during the election of Jakarta's new governor recently. I was a captive audience of one, waiting for my dinner while engulfed in fragrant smoke of sizzling herbs and chicken meat. 'Whatever leader we have, it's just the same,' he complained. 'We still suffer the same fate, we still get digusur (evicted) by the military or the police, and the price of fuel and food still goes up.'
What about our businesses? Well, if they were that great, there'd be much fewer women becoming domestic migrant workers in Singapore and there'd be much more foreign investment, when in fact we still have capital flight. Small and medium-sized industries are said to be the backbone of the Indonesian economy (that is, reliable), but the government doesn't support them enough.
Personal, political and professional loyalty? We live in a pragmatic dog-eat-dog world, but under former president Suharto's New Order a culture and atmosphere of mistrust and looming disaster were deliberately cultivated to justify the state's oppressive and interventionist dominance. 'Reliability' and 'integrity' were things we were brainwashed not to have - 'weakness' and 'compliance', however, were to be cultivated.
And anyway, if the people are exploited so much, why should they be reliable? Whatever they did, they got a raw deal: low pay, bad food and housing, low or no social security. Often the only thing they could rely on was punishment for the slightest infraction, real or imagined, thus paying personally for the mistakes of government policy. So, why bother being reliable? If anything, hone your skills of passive resistance! Unreliability has always been one of the 'weapons of the weak', as James C. Scott puts it in his book on everyday means of peasant resistance.
This meant that unreliability historically became a basic national 'survival strategy', and many Indonesians still believe that they have the right to change their minds at any moment if it suits them better - regardless of the resulting chaos. Unfortunately for us, it is reliability that builds nations, not lame excuses, lies or passive resistance.
Uncertainty - social, economic, legal - also does not foster trust and reliability, as the latter means fulfilling a commitment even if it has become inconvenient because circumstances changed. That's bad news for Indonesia because uncertainty is something we've always had a reliable supply of, thanks to revolutions, riots, terrorism, tsunamis, earthquakes, and other crises.
But whatever the cause, without reliability we lose friends, contracts, aid, investment capital and, above all, trust. Francis Fukuyama got it right when he wrote in his book Trust that it's the vital ingredient for prosperity. That doesn't sound good for Indonesia in a globalised world, does it?
So it is way past time for my fellow Indonesians to become more trustworthy and adopt the reliability habit. Indonesia's future depends on it. Maybe then our economy can grow enough so that Ibu Tati and others like her won't need to work so hard at two or three jobs. Now that really would be something to celebrate on Independence Day.
Julia Suryakusuma is the author of Sex, Power And Nation. She can be contacted on jsuryakusuma@gmail.com
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