Light at the end of the Tunnel ?

As crisis goes, the inability of Indonesia's PLN to supply sufficient electricity, is not as life-threating as , say, the financial meltdown in the late 1990s. Put it simply, the probability of this "Power Crisis" to follow THAT meltdown into standard Economics textbooks are rather low. Nevertheless, hardly a day goes by this week without the front pages screaming one powerful headline after another.

Faisal Basri, a respected Economist, noted that the problem has been identified for some period of time. It is therefore a bit of a mystery why has this issue seen the light of day only in the last week or so.

Mysterious as it is, the problem is quite serious. Every other day, a small section on the respected Kompas daily carried a list of areas which will experience black outs. Both household and industrial customers are affected by the scheduled black outs. The area where your correspondent lives was supposed to have the pleasure of black out experience today, Monday July 14th. Through a stroke of good luck or otherwise, no black out has occured. Such is the nature of the crisis that while visiting an advisor who is ill in Singapore, the president arranged a meeting with an unnamed group of nine Singapore-based businessmen, that his administration is on the case.

In this newspaper's opinion, there is one additional solution that the country must consider. I am of course refering to Nuclear Power.

If Nuclear Power were a brand name, its reputation is quite radioactive. What with Chernobyl and the Three Mile Island "incidents" entering the folklore, it is understandable why governments around the world aren't automatically warming about it. And yet the facts speak for themselves. The current Nuclear power plants are state-of-the art and have received a lot of improvements. France is oft quoted as a shining example where nuclear works: its citizens enjoy one of the lowest electricity bills in the world, and its air is not mixed with CO2.

Of course there are drawbacks. Cost of building a nuclear plant is not exactly cheap. Then there is the age-old question of where to store the waste fuel.

Against these negatives is the ace card. Unlike power plants running on fossil fuels , whose supply as we know are located in suspect governments, nuclear runs on plutonium. Australia , which arguably is more stable than, say, Russia or Kazakhstan, control among the world's largest deposit of plutonium. Supply to Indonesia. This newspaper contends that the government should look into Nuclear, along with Biofuels, Wind and other alternative form of energy.

Book review : The Man from Pare Pare

Presidential memoirs are not exactly on the list of endangered species. A recent visit to a local bookstore chain resulted in no less than 50 titles, dominated by the Soeharto presidency. With this kind of competition, one might wonder if there is a place for one biography of the "accidental president", B.J. Habibie.

Surprisingly (or not ?) , his 512 days in office has so far proved to be less than popular, as measured by the number of books about it. The president himself penned the notable "Detik Detik yang Menentukan" in late 2005, a book which was well received. To latest addition to this slim compendium so far is written by A. Makmur Makka, a former aide.

Reading this work, one feels as if one is watching the "coming soon" clips while waiting for the main feature in a cinema. One only gets to see glimpses , not details. Unfortunately, the clip can't help since the movie is less than watchable.

This memoir appear to be targeted at archivists (did I see anybody raising their hands ?) who may have lost plenty of official documents. For that is surely one's perception , since a majority of this work is a list of government policies and statistics. This is rather surprising, considering memoirs are supposed to give the readers an insight into the subject's thoughts and personalities.

The author skims through arguably most of the subject's life (also a surprising choice, considering a memoir is commonly used to share the subject's life, from childhood onwards). Not too many new , previously unknown details emerged.

More critical reviewers (in case readers have not noticed, your correspondent is not one of them) is likely to judge this work as a mea culpa. Plenty of pages are devoted to the objectives, background and benefits of why Indonesia had to be able to produce the CN-235 and the N-250. Practically no airspace was allocated to why the precious state budget should not have been spent building more bridges, paying higher salaries for teachers and professors or others of that ilk.

In the end, this book tells something else about us as a nation. Our leaders' memoirs focus on what they did while they were in power. It unwittingly gives away the conclusion that after reaching the top, our leaders are not doing anything useful. In your correspondent's view, they should consider devoting their time for the improvement of Indonesia's situation. In this, your correspondent applauds President Habibie's Centre who is consistently pleading the case for democracy and human rights in Indonesia.

(The book is "The True Life of Habibie: Cerita di balik kesuksesan", A. Makmur Makka, IMAN 2008)

Change we can believe in

In the campaign for the presidency , he is a young-ish politician with a message for change. He garnered large sway of support, even as he is fighting against a candidate, coming from arguably one of the most famous political dynasty in the country . In his quest for the presidency, his opponents lashed out charges a plenty yet he remained calm and managed to sooth raw nerves with his eloquent speeches.

Barrack Obama? Hardly. How about SBY. Four years later, he has arguably done a good job in increasing the international standing of Indonesia.

So can speeches make a good leader? Can Obama deliver ? Is SBY delivering on his promises ? Arguably some of the best speech ever dellivered were made by exceptional leaders. Winston Churchill's speeches (or sections of them) are oft quoted and emulated even to this day and age. He is near-universally accepted as a great leader. More recently, President Reagan earned a reputation as "the great communicator" and he is credited with bringing the US out of a long recession , as well as effectively ending the cold war. Closer to home, President Soekarno is known as a stirring orator , a skill at present appears to be lacking in his familial successors.

Of course delivering good speeches are but a small trait every good leader should never leave home without. The other traits are experience, street credibility and that most elusive of them all, the ability to lead his/her charges.

Arguably, Obama lacks experience in running big size organizations (running between aisles of the U.S. Senate, especially for four years, is not exactly comparable to running a country). SBY scores better on this, considering he actually commanded big group of soldiers up to provincial level). Winston Churchill is an odd outlier, having led man in battle (a soldier in the Boer war) and led men in the posh party also known as the Tory party. Reagan's experience in leading the actor's union arguably helped him when he had to fight against other politicians (a species known to be prone to having more than one face).

Street credibility is rather a loose term but it is influenced by past successes or the perception of actually knowing what needs to be done and how to do it.

Finally, that final test, the success in leading the people. At least SBY had 3 years of actually leading a country and not 8 months of running for president. For better or for worse, the act of actually doing " it" , is the best way to answer how successful or not a leader is. The jury is still out for SBY but the jury has not even sat for Obama. Perhaps Obama is best served to return to his childhood city and have a word with its president.

Bombs Away

The recent arrest of bomb makers in Palembang, South Sumatera, was an implosion in your correspondent's confidence level of the security situation in the country. In an ironic twist of development, the Australian government had earlier in the same week, declared the situation in Indonesia to be safer and had modified their travel advisory accordingly.

As this newspaper went to press, the details about the bomber and their deadly devices were still pouring out. Fingers are already being pointed towards cells of JI and links with OBL appear to exist.

While this newspaper applauds the dilligence of the SAS-trained 88th detachment special unit, questions linger on how successful have pre-emptive actions and policies been.

As it stands, clearly there appears to be similarities between people arrested in Palembang with other arrests in the rest of the world. These would be young-ish people disillussioned with the general condition surrounding them.

The root cause of such conditions are unemployment and a tendency to surrender to promises to leave behind the ills of the material world for in exchange for eternal happiness.

Clearly this is a classic textbook case normally outlined in standard texts on Economic Development for instance Michael Todaro's authoritative book with the same title. And as even more made clear, there is no one size fits all solution for the issue.

Nevertheless it pays for the government to be vigilant in identifying the trigger points early on and mitigate them accordingly. One of the best gift that the current administration can give to the incoming 2009 winner will be to ensure that the issue does not blow up in their face.