OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED

When in doubt, think up a number

Indonesia’s second president General Soeharto had a fix-all to calm restless citizens demanding improvements.  He’d pronounce a numbered plan.

Joko Widodo, the seventh leader of the nation, has ignored his millennial advisors’ recommendations for rapid and enforceable action to handle the Covid-19 outbreak.  Instead he’s reverted to a response that kept his last century predecessor in the palace for 32 years.

As the pandemic continued to boil the President announced a ‘five-point plan’.  The integer is important.  It suggests serious analysis has been undertaken, anomalies eliminated and work underway.

The list topper in the latest Widodo version of sprinting on the spot is to ‘evaluate’ the social restrictions applied in just four of the Republic’s 34 provinces.

In Vietnam Noel Coward wrote ‘only mad-dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun’.  He could have composed it in Indonesia.  This hot-season fasting month isn’t the ideal time for public-service exertion so the ‘evaluation’ will plod.

The plague does not – it gallops, jumping work practices, cultural norms and religious observances.  It’s a 24/7 tearaway.  The latest figures show 13,645 cases detected and 959 deaths, but these stats are shonky.

Last week Wiku Adisasmito, head of the Covid-19 expert task force told journos all data would be ‘collected, cleaned revised and integrated’ so accurate figures can be presented.  When?  ‘Soon’.

Widodo’s Point Two seeks a 10,000 a day target for testing.  It’s currently about 2,500.

This policy comes three months after the first Covid-19 cases were revealed in Jakarta. Malaysia’s goal of 16,500 a day is almost there. 

No surprises here as the medical science driving reactions to the pandemic has not been properly explained leaving mad myths to multiply.

The fanatics soon sussed out Satan’s spawn, Bill (Globalist) Gates’ 666 microdot plot to vaccinate the world against Islam. Who knows what’s on the swab sticks imported from godless nations? Best not test.

The President told reporters he’d heard of people fleeing hospitals and clinics fearing confirmation.   Patients under observation yet not quarantining and endangering others had also caught his attention.

Item Three is monitoring new arrivals, something other countries have been doing since February. The World Bank estimates nine million Indonesians work overseas in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Middle East.  

Thousands are now returning home as Covid-19 forces business close-downs abroad.  Not all enter through controlled sea and airports, but dodge across the Malacca Strait using illegal ferries.

Amidst the chaos came reports the government would allow 500 Chinese into the country to work on a nickel smelter in South Sulawesi when millions of locals have lost their jobs.  The arrival of the engineering specialists has been delayed following protests. This gross political clumsiness could let slip the dogs of sinophobia. 

Point Four is telling bureaucrats to speed up distribution of funds to the broke and jobless.  This has been difficult enough in Australia where most departments are efficient; almost all citizens have bank accounts and are online – which is not the case in Indonesia.  

The media has been awash with stories of starving families waiting for government aid.  However if the final part of the President’s plan is implemented the needy will have a hotline to call, assuming they’re not among the 30 per cent without a phone.  Whether anyone will answer – like Centrelink aka Services Australia – or do anything - is yet to be checked.

When grab-‘n-go numbered plans are launched it’s useful to ask:  Why five points – and not six, or ten or whatever?

The Asian Development Bank offers an addition.  It estimates 30 million urbanites don’t have access to soap and water, though this claim needs querying.  Even in the poorest areas people bathe and wash clothes, though often in polluted rivers.  

Some local authority progressives haven’t waited for the Jakarta thumb-twiddlers.  They’ve mobilised utes with tanks and drums, many with sinks, soap, and sanitisers.  These have been parked at intersections for all to use.

The ADB report adds: ‘For the millions who live in slums, the overcrowded, unsanitary conditions are kindling for a swift and sudden wildfire of disease. 

‘Investments in healthcare delivery and infrastructure at this critical time will also further the government’s goals to reduce maternal mortality and deliver clean water and sanitation to households by 2024.’

When my laptop was opened to keyboard this column, a fortnight-long lockdown had been ordered for the morrow. The lid was shut before sunrise.  So was the plan.  Come dawn it was on again.
Indecision here is aptly named plin-plan.

First published in Pearls and Irritations, 12 May 2020: https://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-when-in-doubt-think-up-a-number/

SO WHO CAN WE TRUST?

 But the dead are many

Indonesia’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic makes a train wreck seem structured.  The fourth most populous nation has next to no testing, no info, no direction – and most important of all – no trust. Such is the legacy of authoritarianism.

The population of Malang is nudging Adelaide’s 1.3 million. The South Australian capital has more than 60 ‘funeral homes’ – the Central East Java city just two.  They’re quite unlike their Western equivalents – no faux solemnity, just functionality.

Yayasan Gotong Royong (Mutual Aid Foundation) caters for non-Muslims.  Islamic funerals are DIY family and community affairs using local graveyards where body-trolleys are kept on site.

YGR’s centerpiece is an octagonal warehouse, each wedge designed to be opened so up to eight viewings can take place simultaneously.  It has the tiled ambience of an old public lavatory.

The body of my wife’s friend arrived at YGR around 10 am.  She was buried three hours later. It was assumed she’d died from an ill-defined sickness which had put her in hospital.  We’ll never know because there was no autopsy.

This is the pattern across the archipelago of 6,000 inhabited islands.  In normal times around 4,800 die daily.  Now some may be victims of Covid-19.  Few facts are gathered so health authorities don’t know whether new plagues are on the loose.

Smart Reuters’ journos fossicking through cemetery stats in Jakarta found a 40 per cent boost in burials. City Governor Anies Baswedan reacted: ‘It’s extremely disturbing; I’m struggling to find another reason than unreported Covid-19 deaths.’

In the same week Indonesia R & B singer Glenn Fredly died, apparently from meningitis.  Fans swamped the open coffin jostling for space to take snaps, stopping the lid being lowered for several minutes. 

Here social distancing is measured in millimeters though the latest rule in Jakarta is a limit of five per group and – at last – a partial shutdown in the capital.  Masks are often removed because they raise sweat in the tropical heat. 

Even if it was known my wife’s friend had died from coronavirus her widower would have kept mum; gangs have been stopping burials of Covid19 victims even though religious leaders appeal for tolerance saying plastic-wrapped corpses aren’t contagious. 

The figures are 3,842 cases confirmed, 327 deaths and just 286 recoveries.  Data from the Monarchy next door exposes the grim state of health care in the Republic.  Although more than 4,500 Malaysians have the disease, just 73 have died.  Impressively almost 2,000 have pulled through. 

Testing in Indonesia is slow – more people are checked in a day in NZ than the past month in Indonesia.

With no concerted attempts to spread facts, myths have multiplied faster than the pathogens.  Top rater is the WHO-China international conspiracy theory as endorsed by Fox News commentators.  Demagogues are also doing well.  

Fermenting among the indifference and cynicism is concern the virus will ramp prices.  That’s already happening with garlic, onions and other vegetables deemed essential.  This tangible threat could rouse more anger than the invisible sickness and lead to a breakdown in social order.  The next step would be the military taking over from a weak civil administration.

Public health experts are the new prophets consulting data rather than planets and parchments, though frequently failing to explain their reasoning with clarity.  This has left many preferring the simplistic claptrap of seers wearing skullcaps to the mumbo jumbo of guys in lab coats.

Commented Endy Bayuni, former editor of The Jakarta Post: ‘The government needs professional help … on conveying messages related to Covid-19 without triggering massive panic but without misleading the public to take it easy either.  Crisis management of this scale is too big to be left to a bunch of amateurs.’

Epidemiologists’ statististque du jour is 140,000 deaths if no meaningful intervention.   This is a ghastly scenario – more than the current world-wide toll.  However it’s far less than the estimated half million Indonesians who died in the 1965-66 purge of leftists by Army-backed militias, turning the Republic away from communism and into a crooks’ playground.

Most early plague doomsayers have been foreigners so easily dismissed by bigots like Health Minister Terawan Agus Putranto. He’s a Christian and retired lieutenant general Army doctor who originally prescribed prayer as a Covid-19 prophylactic.  

When Harvard public health analysts claimed Indonesia had undetected cases and should get its skates on, Putranto said the report was ‘insulting’ and the nation well prepared.  Unsurprisingly most trusted US university research.

Now local scientists are getting alarmed. Dr Pandu Riono of the University of Indonesia’s Department of Biostatistics and Population used an Australian webinar last week to publicly plead for President Joko Widodo to understand the seriousness of the situation and ‘respond as the head of the nation.’

Politicians can get stuck into their colleagues but a public institution employee bumping the president is risky in an unsteady democracy where lese majeste laws are edging closer.   

Even the ABC has been slack.  For six nights running this month its one-hour flagship 46-countries TV news program The World ignored the Southeast Asia giant’s plight while focusing on lands elsewhere.

Before the pandemic Widodo paraded a team of Gen Z luminaries he’d consult to reach the nation’s youth.  As predicted in an earlier column they’ve been elbowed away from the cameras by the gerontocracy.

Eventually Widodo admitted treating his people like mushrooms by following the father-knows-best strategy of second president Soeharto during his 32-year militaristic regime.

As few believed anything the government said they whispered scuttlebutt.  Newsmags faxed from abroad were furtively copied and passed around.  

Now platforms aren’t just for trains but cyberspaces where everyone has their own PA system to shout out facts and falsehoods.  The view that secrets can still be contained and cock-and-bulls not fill the void showed stark naivety.

Widodo confessed to the media: ‘We didn’t deliver certain (Covid-19) information to the public because we did not want to stir panic. 

“We will inform the public eventually. However, we have to think of the possibility that the public will react by panicking or worrying, as well as the effect on the recovered patients. Every country has different policies.’

Indeed – and Indonesia’s responses are among the worst. 

##

 

First published in Pearls and Irritations, 13 April 2020: https://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-but-the-dead-are-many/

FLOUNDERING IN A PANDEMIC

Not a model land

Curious about life as a sheep? Visit Incredible Indonesia, as the tourist promos once hollered.

At domestic airports passengers are herded through a full-body drenching like the spray races used by Australian cockies to kill sheep lice.  The bleaters then get scanned with a device like an ear-tag code reader.

Fortunately the authorities aren’t using arsenic plunge dips, once the standard treatment for the woolies’ parasites, or snipping lumps out of ears to mark brands.

Cars leaving cities also get a washdown.  There’s little evidence these procedures frighten Covid-19 germs but presumably comfort some into believing the government has the pandemic under control.

It doesn’t.  The latest modeling suggests the Indonesian death toll could match the US, now the most stricken nation.   Yet the Australian media has so far focused more on the Big Apple than the Big Durian.

Indonesia currently has one of the highest Case Fatality Rates in the world – nudging ten per cent.  A report in The Lancet medical journal estimates the CFR in China where the outbreak began at 1.38 per cent across all age groups.

Few Indonesians are being tested in a country where kits are limited along with facilities to accurately check results.  Only 240 of the gold standard PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests are being performed every day according to the Health Ministry.

West Java Governor Ridwan Kamil told the local media: ‘I’m convinced that the number of cases is many times over the current figure. But because we haven't tested that many people the data shows only a fraction.’

The government has not been open with its citizens. A public health emergency was declared at the end of March.  This was four weeks after the first cases were confirmed.  People were then urged to pray to keep the plague at bay.

President Joko Widodo has rebuffed calls for a lockdown, instead urging all to stay home, an instruction widely ignored. Crowds fill markets and shops and the roads remain busy, though less jammed than a month ago.  Social distancing is rarely seen outside formal institutions like banks and government offices.

The latest figures from Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Centre show Indonesia has 2,273 confirmed cases and 198 deaths.  Most have been in Jakarta where policy conflict between Governor Anies Baswedan and Widodo has been open and acerbic. 

City prohibitions have been overturned by the national government leaving locals not knowing whether they’re Artha or Mawar.  Intercity buses were stopped – then let loose.  Toll roads were closed, and then opened.

A World Bank report claims only one in five Indonesians have enough cash to survive the crisis. Around 25 million – that’s the population of Australia – live on AUD 1.70 a day.  A just introduced ‘staple food’ programme should keep the most needy alive.

The government has allocated Rp 405.1 trillion (AUD 41 billion) to what Widodo has reportedly labeled as ‘extraordinary measures to ensure the people’s health, safeguard the national economy and (ensure) financial system stability’.  

By comparison Australia, with a population one eleventh of the Republic’s, is spending five times more - AUD 226.6 billion (including State inputs) plus AUD 105 billion from Reserve Bank loans.

The Jakarta cashflow favours ‘economic recovery’ (Rp 150 trillion) ahead of health which gets only half the handout though the need is acute.  Australia’s ambassador Gary Quinlan warned stayputs that ‘critical medical care in Indonesia is significantly below Australian standards.’

That was diplomatic.  While the fluro-saturated private clinics look much like their Western counterparts, public hospitals’ waiting rooms are ill-lit, overcrowded, chaotic and clogged by petty procedures.   Doctors ‘forgetting’ appointments are commonplace as they often work two jobs.

Massaging data can cause blindness, but these stark stats from the World Bank reveal much:  In Indonesia 25 per thousand live births never survive to pre-school.  The Singapore figure is 2.8.  It’s a 45-minute ferry ride between the two countries.

Apart from public health decision makers, when this is all over foremost among the pandemic’s casualties should be unconstrained business boosters.  Last year Indonesia was unreservedly touted as the place to sow investments and reap massive profits as the rising middle class hungered for Western foods and goods.

Now the dollars are fleeing fast says Roland Rajah. The Lowy Institute’s International Economy Program director wrote in the AFR that more than AUD 16.5 billion has departed the archipelago since late January while the rupiah has tumbled 15 per cent:

‘Indonesia’s vulnerability is its reliance on capital inflows and evaporating commodity demand, combined with $US410 billion in external debt, mostly in US dollars. 

‘Adding a failure to control the virus would create an even more dangerous cocktail – prompting capital outflows to accelerate and deepening a vicious cycle of falling growth, a plunging exchange rate, and ballooning debt.’

The figures above show the virus is not being controlled.

Then there’s the blame game. In ‘normal’ times Indonesians are friendly towards outsiders.  At times of stress we’re easy targets.  Just like Asians in Australia.

The Australian Human Rights Commission is reportedly receiving large numbers of complaints from Asians alleging racial discrimination related to Covid-19.  Scapegoating is a bastardly response to a borderless plague but at least Canberra is concerned.

There’s no HRC statutory equivalent in Indonesia so no place to protest.  Cop abuse? Cop it sweet.

North Sulawesi province is overwhelmingly Protestant and preparing for Easter, a time of hope.  That didn’t stop slurs from villagers and a furious rant from a senior minister denouncing this journalist from Java a harbinger of the plague.

The synod head had preached that Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness showed self-isolation has Biblical authority. He wasn’t prepared to discuss the story of Christ touching lepers. 

First published in Pearls & Irritations, 7 April 2020:
https://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-not-a-model-land/

 

IRAN NEXT DOOR?

 It’s looking real bad next door

Doomsayers are society’s detestables yet needed as truth-tellers.  So here goes: The omens are awful. Thousands of Indonesians are threatened by the Covid-19 pandemic through denial and indecision.  Responses have been too few, too late and too uncoordinated. 

At last count New South Wales had 2,298 coronavirus cases and ten deaths.   Australia’s most populous State has eight million citizens.  Indonesia’s population is 34 times larger yet has so far detected less than 1,677 carriers and recorded 157 deaths.  (All figures from the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Tracker.)

The archipelago’s mortality rate is currently almost nine per cent of confirmed cases, just behind the shocking stats from Italy.  Internationally the figure is less than three per cent.

In adjacent Malaysia, another Muslim-majority country with a population nine times smaller than Indonesia, 2,908 cases have been detected and 45 have died.

Most Covid-19 positives in Indonesia have come from people who sought swabs after feeling unwell or reckoned they’d been near someone looking crook.  There’s still no mass testing, though this is promised.

(Weird aside: NSW Health uses Vimeo to spread useful info.  Indonesia has banned the free video platform because it won’t censor occasional nudity.)

Foreign alarmists are as unwelcome in Indonesia as professional journos at a Trump presser, so here’s the opinion of three top local scientists, Iqbal Elyazar, Sudirman Nasir and Suharyo Sumowidagdo.  They’re involved in public health and epidemiology.

Writing in The Conversation they claimed the infection rate ‘may increase exponentially’ if there’s no swift effort to curb the spread. 

‘We estimate – with data gathered since March 2 and assuming the doubling times are similar as Iran’s and Italy’s – that at the end of April 2020 there may be 11,000-71,000 Covid-19 cases in Indonesia.’

Far bleaker is separate modeling by the University of Indonesia.  This warns that if distancing and testing aren’t mandated – almost impossible in a densely populated country where discipline is lax - there could be 2.5 million positive cases by the end of the month.

So far only the standard cautions about staying indoors and apart are being promoted and disregarded. 

Indonesia’s health system is sick. The government reports 1.17 beds per thousand citizens, the lowest rate in ASEAN.  (Australia has 3.84 per thousand). WHO says Australia has 3.6 ‘physicians’ per thousand people – Indonesia 0.38.

Low testing levels and unreliable detection systems are skewing the Indonesian figures, but there are many reasons why the world’s fourth most populous nation appears to be facing a heavy tragedy.  After weeks of prescribing prayer the government is only now accepting it has a mortal problem.

It won’t be the Apocalypse as predicted in the Koran, or Armageddon as prophesised in the Bible, but it will fracture the major faiths’ foundations as believers become questioners, perhaps heralding a new Enlightenment.

Religion is to Indonesians as sport is to Australians, deeply embedded in the culture.  Covid-19 is widely seen as the just wrath of a vengeful deity offended by sinners.  These are identified by extremist preachers claiming exclusive WhatsApp lines to an almighty.

When asked why he was attending a big religious gathering one man told a reporter:  ‘I fear Allah more than a virus.’  There have been disturbing videos of relatives unwrapping plastic-covered corpses and hearses being chased away from cemeteries.

Distrust is widespread in a country where corruption thrives and the rule of law does not.  Although General Soeharto’s 32-year despotic rule ended in 1998 with the launch of democracy, the five presidents since have been unable or unwilling to castrate Jakarta’s venal oligarchs who are still screwing the nation.

The slow-speaking President Joko Widodo, now in his second and final five year term, has successfully tackled the sprawling Republic’s infrastructure but not its handling of the pandemic.  Unfortunately he’s no orator like the nation’s founder Soekarno so has been unable to inspire the masses.

WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has stressed that ‘people must have access to accurate information to protect themselves and others. (Misinformation) causes confusion and spreads fear to the general public.’

Widodo wasn’t listening, preferring the advice of Washington’s Dr Donald.  Last week Widodo said his government was preparing medicines, including three million doses of chloroquine ‘having been proven to cure Covid-19 in other countries’.

It hasn’t – but panic buying followed.  The anti-malarial treatment, which has serious side effects, hasn’t been approved by the WHO to treat Covid-19 while clinical trials are ongoing.

Ben Bland, director of the Southeast Asia Program at Australia’s Lowy Institute has called Widodo’s initial response ‘worryingly blasé’:

 ‘The Covid-19 crisis is revealing the weaknesses in his tactical approach to politics, his ad hoc leadership style, and the lack of strategic thinking in his government.’

It’s clear that Widodo’s dithering is based on fears of the masses taking control, chaos erupting and mobs overwhelming the police.  This happened in 1998 when Soeharto fell and to a lesser extent last year when the former general Prabowo Subianto lost the election to Widodo.

Compounding the situation is Mudik (exodus), the mass movement of city folk back to their regional hometowns to celebrate Idul Fitri, the end of the fasting month on 23 May.  It’s the most important event on the Islamic calendar.

Widodo has been toying with the idea of banning Mudik, so tens of thousands have already started boarding public transport and straddling motorbikes.  If their religious duties are thwarted some will seek scapegoats.

Uprisings are rarely spontaneous.  Instead they’re engineered by what Widodo has called ‘shadow figures’ working on political agendas.  They pay street thugs called preman to throw rocks and burn tyres. The giveaways are the printed placards, the demands in perfect English.

The obvious targets are non-pribumi (not native-born) a euphemism for ethnic Chinese, even those whose families have been in the archipelago for centuries.  Most are Christian, Buddhist or Confucian. Almost 90 per cent of the population follows Islam.

If the rapes, killings and burnings that followed Soeharto’s fall last century restart, the persecuted will again rush for refuge in Singapore and Australia.  Thousands have permanent residence status, homes and businesses, particularly around Perth.

Will Canberraturn them back?  

  

First published in Pearls & Irritations, 3 February 2020 https://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-its-looking-real-bad-next-door/