October 5, 2023
JAKARTA – President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo said on Tuesday that his stint as a local government leader helped blaze a trail in the country’s political landscape and that the experience helped him craft and deliver development programs over the past nine years.
In a speech delivered to members of the Indonesian Association of Civil Servants (Korpri), Jokowi said that his firsthand knowledge on how local government works helped him create effective policies while solidifying the cabinet.
“I served as mayor twice, and then governor and president, also twice. There has never been an example like that, starting from the bottom. So, I have firsthand experience of what it was like on the ground,” Jokowi said in his remarks.
Jokowi said that in the past nine years he has used the knowledge gained from his experience to produce interdepartmental policies that have contributed to solidifying the cabinet.
“What I always told these officials, whether they design a state budget or a local budget, don’t come up with too many programs. Don’t spread it out among agencies, just three programs but make sure they work,” the former mayor of Surakarta, Central Java, said.
Jokowi served his seven-year tenure as the mayor of Surakarta before taking up the job of Jakarta governor in 2012, during which time he turned Central Java’s second largest city from a safe haven for terrorists into a popular international destination showcasing Javanese culture.
People of Surakarta considered him to be such a successful mayor that they staged a protest to prevent him from running for the Jakarta governorship in 2012, arguing that they still wanted him to lead the city until his term expired in 2015.
Jokowi was elected Jakarta Governor in 2012 but only served for two years as he was nominated as a presidential candidate by the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) in 2014.
He won his first term after beating former military general Prabowo Subianto, and started his term as President in October 2014.
Jokowi won reelection in 2019 after a close contest against Prabowo, whom he later chose as his defense minister.
Later in his speech to Korpri members, Jokowi applauded civil servants for running the country’s massive bureaucracy.
“Korpri is one of the major forces propelling the nation’s growth. We may have a lot of political parties, but at the end of the day it is Korpri that decides and implements policies,” Jokowi said.
Early in his administration, President Jokowi selected bureaucratic reform as one of the national five-year development plan (RPJMN 2015-2019) priorities.
In 2019, the government began an assessment of middle and lower job positions at state institutions in the first nationwide move to streamline the country’s bureaucracy, which could put hundreds of thousands of civil servants at risk of losing some of their income.
Separately, Korpri chairman Zudan Arief Fakrulloh called on the President to consider skills instead of formal education in the hiring of government workers.
Zudan said that the President himself was living proof that technical skills are more important than formal education in determining the success of a leader.
“Pak Jokowi never had formal education on governance…but he has been a successful mayor, governor and president,” Zudan told reporters.