The two main managers who are following the construction project of Indonesia’s new capital, Nusantara, resigned on Monday without giving official explanations. The transfer of the capital from Jakarta to a central area of Borneo, until a few years ago completely occupied by forests, is an ambitious plan of the outgoing president Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, presented in 2019 and approved in 2022. The current capital Jakarta is in fact a city with https://twitter.com/dw_hotspotasia/status/1797237225601880383: inhabited by 10 million people, it is congested by traffic, very polluted, without parks or cultural spaces and subject to frequent floods. The main problem is the rise in sea levels and the simultaneous sinking of the city: the soil of Jakarta is sinking in some areas of the city by up to 15 centimeters a year.
The resignations of the director and deputy director of the Nusantara National Capital Authority, Bambang Susantono and Dhony Rahajoe, have been interpreted as a further sign of difficulties in the project, the costs of which are estimated at over 30 billion euros. The Indonesian state is financing 20 percent of the work, but is struggling to find international investors.
According to plans, the new city should be inaugurated on August 17, the day on which the anniversary of Indonesian independence is celebrated. However, it will take a long time to finish building it: according to the Indonesian government it will be completed in 2045, the year of the hundredth anniversary of the nation’s independence from the Netherlands.
The state of Nusantara roads in February 2024 (Credit Image: © NASA Earth/ZUMA Press Wire)
Indonesia decided to move its capital from the island of Java, the most important, richest and most influential of its archipelago, in 2019. Work to build Nusantara from scratch began in 2022: the construction site of the new city is located in the eastern part of Kalimantan, the Indonesian area of Borneo (Borneo is the large Asian island whose territory is divided between the states of Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia). The government said in December that necessary infrastructure for the city, such as roads, dams, bridges and government offices, were 63 percent complete, and their construction would be finished by the end of 2024.
The center of the future city at the start of work (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim)
The first transfer of 12,000 public employees was supposed to take place in August, but it was postponed by at least a month because the buildings in which they will have to live have not been completed. President Jokowi will arrive in Nusantara on Tuesday to inaugurate some schools and other works. In November 2023, the president landed for the first time at the new airport, which was built about 15 kilometers from the future city center: the government claims that it will be fully operational within the year.
Nusantara is a project strongly supported by Jokowi, whose second and final term as president expires in October. In March, former general Prabowo Subianto, outgoing defense minister, supported by Jokowi himself, was elected as his successor. Subianto announced that he will continue the project in its original form.
However, in recent months several problems have emerged, especially related to issues of the lay of the land, which have slowed down the works and given rise to many doubts among foreign investors, who are also concerned about the management of the transition between the two presidents. Another issue concerns the ownership of the land on which the city will be built: it currently belongs to the state, which has not yet decided whether to rent or sell it to private individuals.
The resignations of the two top executives of the state company managing the project currently have no official explanation, but the two involved only denied that they were linked to the government’s dissatisfaction with the results obtained. They would then have chosen to leave the project of their own volition, which some observers find even more worrying.
– Read also: Where is Indonesia at with its new capital?
