by Kevin Evans and Protus Tanuhandaru
The long awaited, yet still much higher than expected increases in fuel prices have finally been put into effect. While economists lecture the country ad nauseam that fuel prices even now are barely half the average across the world, this is cold comfort to those on low incomes and whose businesses are dependent upon cheap fuel just to stay competitive.
Too cold is to know that one cause for the scale of the increase is due to the antics of those who work for the state oil company Pertamina. Smuggling and hoarding are just some of the extra curricula activities of these staff whose task is supposedly to ensure the availability of fuel at reasonable prices. None of these misdemeanors, however, will come as anything as a surprise to a public so sickened by rumors of such malfeasance.
For the current management team at Pertamina, the acid test to rehabilitate their company now befalls upon them. And it should begin, inevitably, with their collective resignation. To date, ruefully, we have not seen any public evidence indicating that the current management team members are willing to be accountable for the appalling nocturnal activities that are taking place during their stewardship of Pertamina.
The bewildered, besieged managing director spoke bravely of sacking errant staff—and of how surprised he is in knowing that such behavior does exist in Pertamina. Unfortunately for him, sacking a few low level “blue collar” workers and others located far from Pertamina’s Central Jakarta HQ is far too little and far too late for a public demanding an end to such criminal behavior.
The frostbiting cold can only be thawed by replacing those at the top of Pertamina’s pyramid, not at the bottom. Corporate trust, just like political one, is a powerful yet fragile commodity. Being trusted by your constituents (in politics) or stakeholders (in business), you can achieve much. But when this trust is abused and therefore lost, you become a crippling burden to your organization’s future, exactly resembling the dilemma now facing Pertamina. With trust and credibility evaporated, the current management team can never steer the reforms necessary to revive Pertamina’s long term prospects, regardless of their “technical expertise”.
Sensibly, they should be replaced by genuine outsiders—people untainted by the stench of self-interest and cozy collusion that now envelop the public’s perception of Pertamina.
The challenges that beset Pertamina are quite fundamental. First of all, it has to regain some basis of public trust, given that it is after all a publicly owned enterprise, by coming clean with its state of affairs by using transparency as a key tool. Pertamina’s website, which should display what the public are entitled to know, contains embarrassingly little information. And what is available instead is in corporate terms ancient history—notably the insipid 2002 financial and operational performance.
More substantively, Pertamina needs to engage the wider public by explaining why it is that today it actually produces less than it did almost 40 years ago when it was founded. Pertamina’s production remains stagnant, producing only 100,000 barrels per day or even lower. How much exploration has the company been really involved with over the past few years? More critically, why have levels of exploration been so low?
Other basic problems that undermine Pertamina’s capacity to be a professional business model have to be readdressed. The beleaguered manager of Pertamina is indeed correct to justify that the problems of Pertamina are not all “internal”. Unfortunately, given his and his company’s current dire circumstances, such insights carry no legitimacy and are merely seen by a cynical public as attempts to shift the blame. Ironically, had such intellectual leadership been demonstrated from the time of his appointment, it might be that some of the problems now besetting the company could have been in a state of redress.
Among the problems that confront Pertamina is the nature of its relationship to the government bureaucracy. Here the term “state-owned enterprise” is rather problematic given that Pertamina’s cash-flow is largely contingent on disbursements from the Ministry of Finance—a department that has a key interest in ensuring the stability and security of the State Budget, especially when it is already in deficit. Under these circumstances, basic business imperatives such as investment and growth, which are critical for Pertamina’s long term survival, represent a very low priority for the Ministry.
As a result, Pertamina is financially straight-jacketed, forced to funnel whatever it can salvage into short-term quick fixes rather than longer-term real-growth-oriented ones. This renders it unable to raise its already low productivity because its investment has been used to sustain daily operations, guaranteeing low levels of investment in long term productive expansion. Compared to Petronas, assuming that they both have roughly similar income, Petronas’s Return of Asset (ROA) is five or six times higher than Pertamina’s.
The Ministry of Finance, however, cannot be held entirely liable for hampering Pertamina’s performance. Ambiguity in terms of responsibility for policy development, regulatory enforcement and authority for production confounds the dilemma Pertamina is currently confronting.
To have the Ministry of Finance no longer controlling Pertamina’s coffers is but step towards transforming Pertamina into a real business. In addition, residual regulations that make Pertamina responsible for activities not relevant to its main function as an oil company should be transferred from Pertamina. Next Pertamina should be provided with the standard levels of autonomy and accountability of a productive enterprise. Finally the company should be liberated from other fuzzy mandates such as supporting the budget or being a social entity.
Doing this will definitely move Pertamina from what it is now— that is a Soviet-styled Directorate General for Oil Production transformed into a genuine corporation. However, such transformation requires Pertamina to adopt “good corporate governance principles,” reforming its internal management culture, operating procedures and integrity systems.
In the near term, this will require a full independent audit on its assets, financial status, and ongoing contracts—sweeping through the thicket of vested interests that have subverted Pertamina to its current pathetic state where it appears hopelessly susceptible to so many forms of “loopholes”.
To substantiate this further, the company needs to devise a serious strategic blueprint. This should include, but not be limited to: increasing efficiency, maximizing the use of its assets, assets recovery plan, expansion strategy, and renegotiating, renewing or concluding contracts.
In the medium-term, the goals are to restructure Pertamina’s portfolio, consolidate all sub-companies affiliated to Pertamina, find new and/or alternative energy (non-hydrocarbon) and adopt benchmarks to go international in securing energy resources for Indonesia.
While these two are in progress, Pertamina should seek potential investment partners that will enable it to expand its resource and wider asset base and production.
At the same time we need to accept that implementing such a blueprint will be impossible if the parliament and government cannot reach sensible and vested-interest-free agreements on how state resources (national budget) are to be allocated to finance Pertamina’s investment.
Perhaps instead of contending who is right or wrong, they should form a joint inquiry to contemplate how to achieve a common end in anticipating global oil conditions and making Pertamina a genuine and major contributor for Indonesia.
Having Pertamina structured and managed as a proper commercial entity should definitely cut the unnecessary overhead costs, make it compete with others, and thereby deliver better goods and services. It will certainly be possible to hold its managers to account.
In this situation, the government should play the standard role of shareholders who allow the executive directors of Pertamina to work professionally and accountably, without undue interference. The role of regulators should only be that–to regulate and not to sit as part of the senior management team of a producer. Here the old adage that umpires should not become players is a good one to apply, and especially useful when we consider that it is the fog of ethical confusion, ambiguity and conflicts of interest that has led Pertamina to the very sad state it is in today.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Pertamina problems not just technical, clearly ethical
By Protus Tanuhandaru
(Jakarta Post, September 12, 2005) While not knowing when oil prices will ever come back to earth, having Indonesia as a net oil-importer country, notwithstanding its 43-year OPEC membership, demonstrates that the condition of the national oil industry is much worse than what it had been many years ago.
There is a scarcity of fuel caused by delays in disbursing funds from the Ministry of Finance, poor levels of efficiency due to mismanagement and rampant corruption, and ill-suited state regulations that are most unlikely to bring investment back to Indonesia -- all of which collectively undermine the dynamism of the oil industry.
And as long as these serious conditions are neither redressed nor contained, the state oil company Pertamina is more likely to be blamed than anyone else, despite the fact that the problems that Pertamina confronts are not just technical, but also broadly ethical -- the sort they cannot and should not deal with alone.
One of the ethical problems, which in part guarantees that Pertamina stays ineffective is the ambiguous role of the Oil and Gas Regulatory Agency. Formed by the government to bring greater efficiency to Pertamina while ensuring the greater welfare of the people, the role of such a legitimate, non-departmental agency is to regulate and monitor all activities relating to the oil industry.
But functionally, it has gone awry as the agency has been found engaging in activities beyond regulating and monitoring, but also in activities which should be the task of Pertamina -- such as negotiating terms with foreign companies and oil traders -- thereby raising the question of whether the role of such an agency has not been derailed from what it was originally established to do.
And the bottleneck is being further confounded by incongruously overlapping state regulations, as one requires Pertamina to directly contribute the profit it receives to the national income whereas another stipulates that it continuously assures the availability of domestic fuel supply.
Consequently, the company, with its resources unsustainably stretched, is not -- and will never be -- capable of anticipating the continuously skyrocketing price of crude oil on the international market.
In addition to the perpetual cash flow problem other governmental bodies, with their red tape, have been making it difficult for Pertamina to operate in a commercially timely manner. An example of this was the hike in domestic fuel prices triggered by a shortage of fuel because the Ministry of Finance did not endorse the amount requested to be disbursed in a timely manner so Pertamina could haul petroleum into Indonesia just to fulfill the domestic fuel demand.
Unless these problems are resolved, Pertamina will remain inefficient, commercially impotent, will not reap optimal profits and will be an endless burden continuously draining the national budget.
To begin resolving these ethical problems, however, does not mean Pertamina should deal with them alone, but to have an additional institution -- not related to the stakeholders -- to analyze and clarify whether roles, regulations, and interventions have been ethically appropriate or not to date.
If they have not, such an institution will have to place the activities back on track, to amend regulations which do not work and which overlap, and to minimize the red tape of other government agencies that interfere in Pertamina's activities.
Waiting for this institution to deal with ethical issues, the prerequisite to revamp Pertamina -- before it became very much privatized, -- is to revitalize its assets, maximize its profit and most importantly, to have it run as a proper commercial business that applies pure, professional business principles.
Core issues should include maximizing shareholder (the public) value and not patronizing other groups and assorted vested interests. And as soon as regulations and roles are no longer ambiguous and overlapping, Pertamina can then become a world class corporation that is transparent, accountable, professional, and most profoundly, financially independent and commercially-receptive to the dynamic condition of the global oil market.
Still, making these two work abreast will definitely require close coordination in which corporate leadership is somewhat extraordinary -- capable of carefully restructuring the company while maintaining the trust of its shareholders, engaging other regulators and building credible lines of communications with the wider community. The corporate leader needs to be able to think outside the existing box of management and policy approaches.
Seeing these as criteria, the potential leader is very unlikely to be found within Pertamina, as it is one of the stakeholders whose problems needs to be solved, but should perhaps be someone who has had extensive experience in how to resolve business issues that are ethically and politically enmeshed, and who has neither personal commercial nor other interests that may be considered liable to compromise objective management and policy making.
Since restructuring means getting foreign investment to finance the activities related, only by being free of corruption and other ethical challenges can such a leader be capable of having close rapport with -- and win the hearts and minds of -- potential investors, both foreign and domestic, who have been skeptical of how and when the Indonesian oil and gas industry, however abundant resources are, will change for the better.
While candidates still have to think of how to meet these criteria, other challenges such as gender perspectives, however, might arise when women offer their leadership, but are rejected merely on the basis of gender and deemed as not having the "mettle and the logical reasoning" men are assumed to have.
But this is not true.
Such preponderant misconceptions have long been debunked and are no longer valid, as there are many women -- Indonesians included -- who have provided great corporate leadership, especially to companies in time of great distress. And, likewise, the whole idea of how to appropriately solve the ethical problems will be mere platitudes and meaningless if the gender perspective becomes another ethical issue. Keeping women out of the national oil industry unethically abridges their right to lead the state oil company.
So overall, solving potential ethical issues, whatever they might be, would mean to understand how to ethically approach them and finding the best solution.
(Jakarta Post, September 12, 2005) While not knowing when oil prices will ever come back to earth, having Indonesia as a net oil-importer country, notwithstanding its 43-year OPEC membership, demonstrates that the condition of the national oil industry is much worse than what it had been many years ago.
There is a scarcity of fuel caused by delays in disbursing funds from the Ministry of Finance, poor levels of efficiency due to mismanagement and rampant corruption, and ill-suited state regulations that are most unlikely to bring investment back to Indonesia -- all of which collectively undermine the dynamism of the oil industry.
And as long as these serious conditions are neither redressed nor contained, the state oil company Pertamina is more likely to be blamed than anyone else, despite the fact that the problems that Pertamina confronts are not just technical, but also broadly ethical -- the sort they cannot and should not deal with alone.
One of the ethical problems, which in part guarantees that Pertamina stays ineffective is the ambiguous role of the Oil and Gas Regulatory Agency. Formed by the government to bring greater efficiency to Pertamina while ensuring the greater welfare of the people, the role of such a legitimate, non-departmental agency is to regulate and monitor all activities relating to the oil industry.
But functionally, it has gone awry as the agency has been found engaging in activities beyond regulating and monitoring, but also in activities which should be the task of Pertamina -- such as negotiating terms with foreign companies and oil traders -- thereby raising the question of whether the role of such an agency has not been derailed from what it was originally established to do.
And the bottleneck is being further confounded by incongruously overlapping state regulations, as one requires Pertamina to directly contribute the profit it receives to the national income whereas another stipulates that it continuously assures the availability of domestic fuel supply.
Consequently, the company, with its resources unsustainably stretched, is not -- and will never be -- capable of anticipating the continuously skyrocketing price of crude oil on the international market.
In addition to the perpetual cash flow problem other governmental bodies, with their red tape, have been making it difficult for Pertamina to operate in a commercially timely manner. An example of this was the hike in domestic fuel prices triggered by a shortage of fuel because the Ministry of Finance did not endorse the amount requested to be disbursed in a timely manner so Pertamina could haul petroleum into Indonesia just to fulfill the domestic fuel demand.
Unless these problems are resolved, Pertamina will remain inefficient, commercially impotent, will not reap optimal profits and will be an endless burden continuously draining the national budget.
To begin resolving these ethical problems, however, does not mean Pertamina should deal with them alone, but to have an additional institution -- not related to the stakeholders -- to analyze and clarify whether roles, regulations, and interventions have been ethically appropriate or not to date.
If they have not, such an institution will have to place the activities back on track, to amend regulations which do not work and which overlap, and to minimize the red tape of other government agencies that interfere in Pertamina's activities.
Waiting for this institution to deal with ethical issues, the prerequisite to revamp Pertamina -- before it became very much privatized, -- is to revitalize its assets, maximize its profit and most importantly, to have it run as a proper commercial business that applies pure, professional business principles.
Core issues should include maximizing shareholder (the public) value and not patronizing other groups and assorted vested interests. And as soon as regulations and roles are no longer ambiguous and overlapping, Pertamina can then become a world class corporation that is transparent, accountable, professional, and most profoundly, financially independent and commercially-receptive to the dynamic condition of the global oil market.
Still, making these two work abreast will definitely require close coordination in which corporate leadership is somewhat extraordinary -- capable of carefully restructuring the company while maintaining the trust of its shareholders, engaging other regulators and building credible lines of communications with the wider community. The corporate leader needs to be able to think outside the existing box of management and policy approaches.
Seeing these as criteria, the potential leader is very unlikely to be found within Pertamina, as it is one of the stakeholders whose problems needs to be solved, but should perhaps be someone who has had extensive experience in how to resolve business issues that are ethically and politically enmeshed, and who has neither personal commercial nor other interests that may be considered liable to compromise objective management and policy making.
Since restructuring means getting foreign investment to finance the activities related, only by being free of corruption and other ethical challenges can such a leader be capable of having close rapport with -- and win the hearts and minds of -- potential investors, both foreign and domestic, who have been skeptical of how and when the Indonesian oil and gas industry, however abundant resources are, will change for the better.
While candidates still have to think of how to meet these criteria, other challenges such as gender perspectives, however, might arise when women offer their leadership, but are rejected merely on the basis of gender and deemed as not having the "mettle and the logical reasoning" men are assumed to have.
But this is not true.
Such preponderant misconceptions have long been debunked and are no longer valid, as there are many women -- Indonesians included -- who have provided great corporate leadership, especially to companies in time of great distress. And, likewise, the whole idea of how to appropriately solve the ethical problems will be mere platitudes and meaningless if the gender perspective becomes another ethical issue. Keeping women out of the national oil industry unethically abridges their right to lead the state oil company.
So overall, solving potential ethical issues, whatever they might be, would mean to understand how to ethically approach them and finding the best solution.
From Combination of Wireless Technology, Fiber Optics, and SMS to Ensuring Transparency and Accountability
By Protus Tanuhandaru
KOMPAS, 28 March 2005
Almost three months after the Tsunami wiped out most of the coastal regions in Aceh, the devastated regions are still left with nothing but rubbles and debris. And not only they have become a place where thousands of people are dead and massively buried, but the internally-displaced-persons (IDP) are now at the verge of being endangered by starvation and exposed to the harsh condition of post-mortems disaster.
Dealing with such preponderant problems, both governmental and nongovernmental institutions needed to contemplate how to work their relief and reconstruction efforts to their maximum capacity.
Of many initiatives in progress, one crucial prerequisite to begin humanitarian relief effort, before any complicated relief operation should take place, is to know who is doing what, how to help the IDPs, what types of supplies to distribute, and where these profound items should go to. Not identifying what to do precisely would only lead all efforts to go awry and perhaps would cause overlaps and gaps – meaning that some relief agencies are possibly having similar endeavors, yet there are also some fields of exigency left untouched.
Then information has become a crucial factor that would greatly ease the coordination of relief efforts.
However, with scarce resources available and working to provide aid in a military-conflicting region, sending people continuously back and forth to collect data has been a very daunting, almost impossible task. The problem is further worsened when most of the roads and bridges connecting between cities have not been fully repaired, thereby nullifying the option of sending the field-data-collecting agents via ground transport. Therefore, the most efficient, ideal yet exorbitant mean of transport is to go aerial.
In reality, these problems have indeed been revolving and have evinced us that something else must be done to simplify the relief operation.
This is when information technology (IT) plays an important role to overcome physical obstacles. By deploying IT equipments – wireless connectivity, computers and their peripherals – to several IDP camps, field-data-collecting agents do not have to commute to their headquarter and therefore submit the data they have been collecting. But instead, they could conveniently stay put and keep working sedentarily at a place where internet connectivity is available. Had these facilities not been available, the relief efforts might not be as effective as what we have today.
In addition to the implementation of IT-based humanitarian relief effort, the Government of Indonesia is considering to include this IT feature to its comprehensive plan of rebuilding the province of Aceh. Although IT has been very useful in the emergency relief phase, some people perhaps are now questioning whether the profundity of the will-be-implemented IT infrastructure – incorporated into the comprehensive plan – would be as good as it was used in the emergency phase, doubting that the Acehnese – with their current level of education and economic activity that do not really use much of IT application – would be ready for such an enormous IT investment.
Sure, for some people, this feature seems to be slightly redundant, particularly when they realize that the IT investment will be worth millions of dollars. However, it should be taken into account that the comprehensive plan is a permanent plan in which there exist many features supporting an ideal community. These features, replete with their zoning regulation – residential, commercial, and industrial – are to build roads, sewer system, public buildings, parks, mass transits, schools, and even to reserve open spaces for future development. And information technology is just as important as these features are. So if IT is viable and therefore can be included in the comprehensive plan as well, however costly it might be, why not implement it to its fullest potential?
Adding information technology to the comprehensive plan means speeding up the reconstruction process, shortening its timeline compared to its original plan. Better way of communication, such as sending electronic mail instantly and wirelessly from where people work, will enable them to work efficiently and to access global resources needed for the reconstruction effort. In addition, the other trade-off of having IT solution is to reduce operational costs – the cost of transporting people to commute to the nearest media center so that they can finish their task.
Together with wireless device implementation, the most striking of the will-be IT infrastructure is the newly planned fiber optic network that will connect the existing SEA-ME-WE 3 international fiber-optic gateway to Medan, Lhokseumawe, Banda Aceh, Calang, and eventually to Meulaboh. The SEA-ME-WE 3 itself is stretching from Europe to Australia.
Rather than implementing terrestrial fiber optics (land fibers), the undersea fiber optics is one of the best solutions to avoid land proprietary disputes in the future.
Based on many discussion involving many people, it is obvious that information collected from post-tsunami region have become so essential as something to initiate relief. And in such rehabilitation and reconstruction, many accurate information are immediately needed. Not having accurate data has become the most profound phenomenon, which is being experienced by many relief agencies in the last three months.
Therefore, involvement of many people also determines the success of resolving issues entailed in the rehabilitation and reconstruction process. Because ICT facility in all of region affected by the Tsunami is still inadequate, to establish new networking system will obviously render an exceptionally high cost, notwithstanding the issue of controlling and monitoring funds being donated from many overseas institutions.
One of many ways to anticipate this transparency and accountability issue, AirPutih Foundation, an institution that voluntarily provides wireless connectivity in Aceh, is contemplating to provide additional access-to-information feature such as Short Message Service (SMS), which will be facilitated by all GSM operators.
Such a service will use the access code number 9731, but will be free of premium charge, meaning that every information sent to this number will only be charged approximately Rp. 250 – Rp. 350, not the commercial rate Rp. 1000 – Rp. 2000.
Through this SMS service, the government, and all entities involved in Aceh will be able to share variety of information such as the condition of IDP camp, logistic and importantly report of corruption in using donated funds.
KOMPAS, 28 March 2005
Almost three months after the Tsunami wiped out most of the coastal regions in Aceh, the devastated regions are still left with nothing but rubbles and debris. And not only they have become a place where thousands of people are dead and massively buried, but the internally-displaced-persons (IDP) are now at the verge of being endangered by starvation and exposed to the harsh condition of post-mortems disaster.
Dealing with such preponderant problems, both governmental and nongovernmental institutions needed to contemplate how to work their relief and reconstruction efforts to their maximum capacity.
Of many initiatives in progress, one crucial prerequisite to begin humanitarian relief effort, before any complicated relief operation should take place, is to know who is doing what, how to help the IDPs, what types of supplies to distribute, and where these profound items should go to. Not identifying what to do precisely would only lead all efforts to go awry and perhaps would cause overlaps and gaps – meaning that some relief agencies are possibly having similar endeavors, yet there are also some fields of exigency left untouched.
Then information has become a crucial factor that would greatly ease the coordination of relief efforts.
However, with scarce resources available and working to provide aid in a military-conflicting region, sending people continuously back and forth to collect data has been a very daunting, almost impossible task. The problem is further worsened when most of the roads and bridges connecting between cities have not been fully repaired, thereby nullifying the option of sending the field-data-collecting agents via ground transport. Therefore, the most efficient, ideal yet exorbitant mean of transport is to go aerial.
In reality, these problems have indeed been revolving and have evinced us that something else must be done to simplify the relief operation.
This is when information technology (IT) plays an important role to overcome physical obstacles. By deploying IT equipments – wireless connectivity, computers and their peripherals – to several IDP camps, field-data-collecting agents do not have to commute to their headquarter and therefore submit the data they have been collecting. But instead, they could conveniently stay put and keep working sedentarily at a place where internet connectivity is available. Had these facilities not been available, the relief efforts might not be as effective as what we have today.
In addition to the implementation of IT-based humanitarian relief effort, the Government of Indonesia is considering to include this IT feature to its comprehensive plan of rebuilding the province of Aceh. Although IT has been very useful in the emergency relief phase, some people perhaps are now questioning whether the profundity of the will-be-implemented IT infrastructure – incorporated into the comprehensive plan – would be as good as it was used in the emergency phase, doubting that the Acehnese – with their current level of education and economic activity that do not really use much of IT application – would be ready for such an enormous IT investment.
Sure, for some people, this feature seems to be slightly redundant, particularly when they realize that the IT investment will be worth millions of dollars. However, it should be taken into account that the comprehensive plan is a permanent plan in which there exist many features supporting an ideal community. These features, replete with their zoning regulation – residential, commercial, and industrial – are to build roads, sewer system, public buildings, parks, mass transits, schools, and even to reserve open spaces for future development. And information technology is just as important as these features are. So if IT is viable and therefore can be included in the comprehensive plan as well, however costly it might be, why not implement it to its fullest potential?
Adding information technology to the comprehensive plan means speeding up the reconstruction process, shortening its timeline compared to its original plan. Better way of communication, such as sending electronic mail instantly and wirelessly from where people work, will enable them to work efficiently and to access global resources needed for the reconstruction effort. In addition, the other trade-off of having IT solution is to reduce operational costs – the cost of transporting people to commute to the nearest media center so that they can finish their task.
Together with wireless device implementation, the most striking of the will-be IT infrastructure is the newly planned fiber optic network that will connect the existing SEA-ME-WE 3 international fiber-optic gateway to Medan, Lhokseumawe, Banda Aceh, Calang, and eventually to Meulaboh. The SEA-ME-WE 3 itself is stretching from Europe to Australia.
Rather than implementing terrestrial fiber optics (land fibers), the undersea fiber optics is one of the best solutions to avoid land proprietary disputes in the future.
Based on many discussion involving many people, it is obvious that information collected from post-tsunami region have become so essential as something to initiate relief. And in such rehabilitation and reconstruction, many accurate information are immediately needed. Not having accurate data has become the most profound phenomenon, which is being experienced by many relief agencies in the last three months.
Therefore, involvement of many people also determines the success of resolving issues entailed in the rehabilitation and reconstruction process. Because ICT facility in all of region affected by the Tsunami is still inadequate, to establish new networking system will obviously render an exceptionally high cost, notwithstanding the issue of controlling and monitoring funds being donated from many overseas institutions.
One of many ways to anticipate this transparency and accountability issue, AirPutih Foundation, an institution that voluntarily provides wireless connectivity in Aceh, is contemplating to provide additional access-to-information feature such as Short Message Service (SMS), which will be facilitated by all GSM operators.
Such a service will use the access code number 9731, but will be free of premium charge, meaning that every information sent to this number will only be charged approximately Rp. 250 – Rp. 350, not the commercial rate Rp. 1000 – Rp. 2000.
Through this SMS service, the government, and all entities involved in Aceh will be able to share variety of information such as the condition of IDP camp, logistic and importantly report of corruption in using donated funds.
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