Worshippers leaving Jakarta’s Sunda Kelapa mosque after Friday prayers recently had little choice but to snake out in single file, squeezed between beggars and street sellers competing for their attention.
The beggars, mostly women, clutched suitably forlorn-looking children in one hand and a plastic cup in the other, while the street sellers hawked everything from prayer mats and sarongs to machetes and elephant tusks.
“My husband’s been crippled in an accident so he can’t work, and this is the only thing I can do while looking after the children,” says Dina Putiastuti, begging with her three-year-old son and 20-month-old daughter. “I want to become a trader but I don’t have any money and the government won’t help.”
None of the worshippers complained. Such scenes have been part of the culture in the world’s most populous Muslim nation for decades, particularly during Ramadan (which ended on Saturday), when beggars seek to exploit Muslims’ duty to be more generous and traders hope to capitalise on people’s need to buy presents for Eid, the holiday that celebrates the end of the fasting month.
These ad hoc street emporiums will, however, soon be consigned to history in Jakarta. Or that is what the city’s administration plans, as part of a radical strategy to tackle the burgeoning informal economy in the sprawling, congested, polluted metropolis that is home to some 12m people.
The target is to make Jakarta a developed city in five years. Begging and busking, giving to beggars and buskers, and trading on bridges, pavements and public thoroughfares will be punished with hefty fines. So will living under flyovers. Locations where motorcycle taxis and street food sellers can operate will be severely limited. Spitting, littering and smoking on public transport are also among the litany of new offences.
Achmad Suaidy, head of the Jakarta legislature commission, which wrote the public order by-law, says the aim of the clean-up is to boost investment. “Once Jakarta is better ordered, more foreign capital will come here,” he said, citing similar campaigns in the Netherlands. “That will stimulate employment, which in turn will absorb all the people who are currently unemployed.”
A similar by-law was passed in several other places, including Medan, Indonesia’s third-largest city, earlier this year. As in Jakarta, reaction was mixed; people want improved public order but not to be too strictly regulated.
Vocational training centre networks will be expanded to help those threatened by the regulation to find work. “This is not anti-poor,” Mr Achmad says. “It will probably take three months for the interior ministry to approve this and then we will publicise it for six months before enforcement.”
Opposition to the government’s strategy is mounting, however.
Sri Palupi, director of the Institute for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, says there has been no consultation on the public order campaign, let alone putting in place the necessary measures to provide alternative employment for the hundreds of thousands of poor.
In effect it “bans all work by poor people and also doesn’t give any room for poor people to live in marginal areas”, she says. “So by default they’ve got nowhere to live. The authorities have planned this so badly and so many people are going to face punishment, I think formal resistance is inevitable.”
Worshippers at the mosque admitted they were likely to violate the by-law and continue to give money to beggars and buskers. “It’s a dilemma,” says a civil servant. “The city needs cleaning up but you can’t regulate people’s souls. If we want to give to beggars why shouldn’t we be allowed to?”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
