A midnight rant/critique of the Indonesian public sector from an observing student in the middle-sector.
This whole article is dedicated as a midnight rant from a middle-class Indonesian citizen whose observations of the Indonesian public sector’s work cultures and how what’s normal for them is just weirdly inefficient and stupid. This article is an opinion piece by yours truly and may be biased to my experiences.
I am grateful that my city even has a Universal Health Coverage program. I love how Semarang City stood up and gave every single one of their citizens a way to get state-backed and funded healthcare, all without having to pay a monthly bill to the BPJS program to get the benefits. Without it, I wouldn’t have had the chance to go to a psychiatrist and get medications in the past half a year or so. But being a beneficiary of this healthcare program gave me insight on how the public sector works, like literally how they work. And it’s not that good in my eyes.
From the weirdly inconvenient working hours of the public sector to the awful layers of bureaucracy that we have to go through to even become a beneficiary of the public welfare system. I have so much to rant about how Indonesia’s ambitions of a welfare state is hindered by it’s own public sector. Don’t even get me started with the high politics aspects of this.
The confusing hype of the Public Sector Job
One of the funniest things that I see in Indonesian culture is how people, especially those from the middle class and lower, over glorify public sector jobs. We have reached the point of the monetization of training programs aimed for people seeking public sector jobs. Go to your local bookstores in Indonesia and among your college entry tips and guidebooks are thick bundles of books targeted towards people seeking public sector jobs. It’s so deeply rooted in society that parents push their children to succumb to the public sector office and work as a PNS (Pegawai Negeri Sipil, Indonesian for “public servant”) and/or ASN (Aparatur Sipil Negara, Indonesian for “state civil apparatus”).
These two titles, workers of Indonesian government bodies and state-owned enterprises, have been seen as that one career path that every Indonesian parent ever under the average income bracket have told their children to pursue. It’s a title that is seen very highly by Indonesians everywhere, an end goal for them to proceed with vertical mobility. It’s a job title that promises you a good life, a stable income and an easy-going future.
This baffles me in the way that at the lowest ranks you’d be making barely enough to survive with how much the costs of living in Indonesia has risen among the years. Reading through sources like CNN Indonesia (I know, Indonesian journalism writes the most random selection of articles), the bottom line salaries in Category Ia is only around 1.6 to 2.5 million IDR. Just barely edging most regional minimum wage requirements. That sounds very egregious if it’s not for the various additional allowances that they get. From family to housing allowances, this is a wildcard that can double or even exceed your base wages as a civil servant. Even then, it would be pretty challenging to live a lifestyle beyond the bare minimum under these circumstances. Lately even, there has been lots of talks about how these wages don’t even follow the path of inflation and general buying power as a consumer.
At the highest levels though, Category IVe salary with a leadership position in the higher echelons of the structure, you’d be more grateful that you’re there. You can get up to 3 times what the lower level worker gets in average. There is often a disparity between these two extremes, and this is what gets people hooked into being a civil servant. They see the job stability and the possibility of a life fulfilling career path that these public sector jobs give. And I get it, state-backed government job with many, and I mean, many incentives and allowances. It’s great, but it’s also feels monotone almost. I just don’t get the hype you know. There are other jobs out there that would value your work many times over, sometimes with less burdens associated with being a brown-uniformed PNS.
The god damned work culture
This, one of the things I am really feeling like ranting about here. The work culture of these public sector jobs. At least the outsiders’ view on their work culture. While the entrepreneurs and the blue-collar office workers of the private sector work your usual 9–5, or even more in some industries, the public sector seem to take a different approach, a very convenient approach from what I’ve observed. From government offices closing at 11am on Fridays, to the 4pm cutoff time for most public-serving government offices. It just seems weird that the public-facing services are scheduled in ways that just doesn’t make sense.
For one, let’s grab an example of my local health office/primary health facility. Their regular hours are: 7am to 4pm on weekdays and 7am to 2pm specifically for Fridays. This place is also the place where you go and manage your state-provided health coverage. In an ideal weekday, the average office worker would not have the time to go and take health checks and such, at best you get an hour or two in the morning. Even students have at most an hour of time to get checkups or whatever after school. It’s just inconvenient for a good chunk of the productive society. On special occasions like the month of Ramadan, it gets worse. It just closes at 2pm every day. Which is way more inconvenient. Like I get the whole needing to prepare to break your fast thing but surely you can prepare at 4pm. It’s convenient to them, not to the public at most times. I had to go there earlier to manage my health insurance because I have a scheduled control appointment and it’s inactive for some reason. I went there at 2.30pm not knowing that their schedule changed, came in and out empty handed. No notices or anything too. This would give me a good way to segue to my next point on the bureaucratic inefficiencies but it can wait.
Another big point that I hate about public sector work ethics and cultures is just how normalized corruption is here. Like not just the higher level leaders and politicians, but also within the ranks. There are lots of stories of lower rank officials being coerced into corruption by their higher-ups and even threatened to be fired if they do not comply and go along with it. It’s that normalized. Want to create a drivers’ license but too lazy to take part in the tests associated with it? Just bribe the officials like 600k IDR to get it done quick with no questions asked. Got caught speeding or not wearing a helmet on a motorcycle in the road, just pay the police officer a “convenience fee” of 100k IDR and you’re off the books and court obligations. It’s so normalized that even politicians act like it’s a normal thing for them and their cronies to steal taxpayers money, it’s a part of the job and the Indonesian experience almost. We as a society is that desensitized to the practice that it’s just accepted as a given. And in the public sector it thrives, it happens every single day, public-facing or not. With every single transaction of office supplies or the material costs for a specific construction project, some goes into the pockets of those in charge. It’s just shit and toxic being the actual workforce of the government. I hate it here if you haven’t caught up already.
Leaders in Inefficiency
All of that toxic and inconvenient work culture leads to one of the worst things of being Indonesian in my opinion, the absolute inefficiency and stupidity of Indonesian Public Services and administration. Many times have the government tried to simplify this process, like for example when we switched as a nation from regular ID Cards to NFC-powered e-KTPs that is supposed to revolutionize Indonesian bureaucracy. All that matters not because in the end, whenever you need to manage anything related to government administration, you will still be asked for a photocopy of that precious e-KTP.
Another example on how I had to reactivate my health insurance the first time around last January, apparently for whatever reason they deactivate your health insurance at the start of the year, leading me to delay my psychiatry control by two weeks. Why two weeks you may ask? Well I have to fit into my already hectic schedules, a few trips back and forth to my neighborhood leaders asking for signatures, then bringing those signatures to the neighborhood level government office to get a letter from them as a requirement, then having to wait a few days for it to be processed and get signed by the required officials and yadda yadda a whole week wasted just to get my health insurance reactivated for no fault of my own. Now imagine if that’s happening to someone with a chronic illness, who needs constant medications to survive at all. Yeah, it’s harmful.
What’s more intriguing for me is the constant push from the government to digitalize everything. And they did, very poorly. Now they’re pushing people to switch from their e-KTPs to a digital ID system that is half-baked, full of security vulnerabilities, and is overall just shit UI/UX wise. This applies also to many more systems in Indonesia. Want to register for a passport? Download an app for that! It’s just counterproductive to the point that digitalization is bringing more harm than good to Indonesian bureaucracy. And that harm is very much visible today. Many times have we seen our private data leaked and hacked into by hackers and sold in big batches to hacker forums. We joke and call our country an “open source” country with how much of our government held data is out there. Which is kind of ironic because Zero of our government’s applications and services are open source and secure. Even if it worked, there’s a good chance that you still need to scan your ID card or idk go to a fucking kiosk in some government office to get it finalized or done at all. It’s just very inefficient this system, and the people behind it is very much complicit, especially those in higher positions and ranks. We need more meritocracy in this sector man.
It’s just stupid y’know, all of our taxes, gone to the pockets of the oligarchy and the higher ranking officials in our own government. All of the potential money that could’ve been used to build an actual solution to our stupid bureaucracy. All the potential budgets that could’ve been allocated to providing better wages for not just public officials, but teachers and lecturers and even plain old blue-collar workers who need assistance in this unstable rollercoaster of an economy. I hate it here.
previously posted on Medium at https://medium.com/@fjello/a-public-shame-3ba66115ba43
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