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Jakartans this week mark their city’s 482nd anniversary by kicking off a monthlong bash, but most feel they have little to celebrate.

Sure, Jakarta has never had so many shopping malls, five-star hotels, luxury apartments and fine-dining establishments — but that’s about it. In the meantime, smack in the center of the city, it’s still common to find streets with potholes that have been around since time immemorial.

To most Jakartans, always present in their minds is the city’s horrendous traffic — 5.5 million vehicles roam the streets daily, which remains a perennial nightmare.

TransJakarta, the public transportation scheme designed to alleviate the people’s plight in trekking from one point to another, continues to be beset with problems. To date, it remains simply a makeshift solution to the city’s traffic problems, no more, no less.

The notion that the TransJakarta busway would encourage people to leave their cars at home and take public transportation to work has not exactly become a reality. On balance, it does provide Jakartans with a convenient means of transportation. However, the users are the same people who previously took the battered, overcrowded buses, not those who left their cars at home.

Meanwhile, the blueprint to set up a mass rapid transit system continues to gather dust, as the city’s bureaucrats bicker with their central government counterparts about funding matters.

As usual, it bogs down on politics and certain quarters with self-interests. In a recent public discussion on corruption and public service, an official from the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) pointed out that Jakarta ranks first among other provinces in terms of public complaints about bribery and kickbacks.

And that’s just for starters, as the city’s air is among the most polluted in the world as a result of the millions of motor vehicles belching out fumes and the mountains of untended trash.

According to a recent study by the Bandung Institute of Technology, this untended trash seeps into the ground and contaminates the water underneath, imposing an array of diseases on its users.

Jakarta’s drainage system is so poor that a short downpour is enough to cause floods all over the city. Hardly surprising, as only 5,000 tons of the 6,500 tons of trash generated daily here is transported to a dump in the satellite city of Bekasi. The remaining amount ends up in the city’s 13 rivers and on the streets.

Jakarta’s governor, the German-trained engineer Fauzi Bowo, has let it be known that by 2012 Jakarta will be free of floods. A World Bank-assisted project to dredge all 13 rivers, he has said, is set to take care of that.

At the core of the problem, in no small measure, are the city’s nine million people, to whom discipline is an alien concept. Unless Jakartans change their habit of disposing of trash at anytime and any place, it remains to be seen whether all that dredging work will make a dent in the annual floods.

It’s noteworthy that Bowo is the first civilian to administer the city since the early 1960s. Prior to that period, the nation’s power-holders deemed that only no-nonsense military officers were up to the task of managing Jakarta.

None, however, were able to match the elan and imagination of the late Ali Sadikin, a retired three-star general who in the early 1970s planted the seeds for Jakarta to transform itself from being “a big village” into a metropolis in waiting.

At one time, when a lack of funds prevented him from widening and improving Jakarta’s narrow and bumpy streets, Sadikin allowed a lottery as a way to make up the deficit. No sooner had work on the streets begun when Muslim zealots cried foul and censured the scheme as a form of gambling, and thus haram . Sadikin brushed them aside by saying that they should simply shun the widened and improved streets if they wished to maintain that line of thinking.

Bowo has often pointed out that Jakarta could become a better city if only its residents would love the city the way New Yorkers, Parisians or Romans love theirs.

That, in essence, is the city’s and its administrators’ biggest challenge. It has a $2 billion annual budget; apportioning at least 1 percent of that to intensive public campaigns encouraging residents to care more for their habitat is probably a move Sadikin would have done by now.



Taufik Darusman is a veteran Jakarta-based journalist.