YAKARTA (Reuters) – Indonesia shelved President Joko Widodo’s $33 billion plan to move the capital to Borneo Island as it struggles to curb the coronavirus pandemic, The Minister of Planning reported.
The planned structure of government buildings for the new city will be suspicious until Indonesia sees “the gentleness at the end of the tunnel” about the epidemic, said Suharso Monoarfa, who oversees a master plan for the new city.
“We are the recovery of the economy and the fight against the pandemic as our number one priority,” Monoarfa told Reuters in an interview broadcast Tuesday.
“When the scenario gets better, only then will we know what we’re going to do,” he added.
He brazenly declared obstacles to the allocation and said the launch of the revolution may be delayed until 2022 or 2023, as the government focuses its efforts on researching and then distributing a COVID-19 vaccine to a population of approximately 270 million.
Construction of a state palace and other buildings was first scheduled to begin until 2021, along with the modernization of airports, seaports and the structure of access roads in the forested domain destined for transformation into a new smart city.
Officials were expected to begin moving until 2024, which is expected to mark the last year of Widodo’s tenure.
Widodo unveiled the allocation last year to cargo in Jakarta, a city full of another 10 million people on the island of Java suffering traffic jams, normal floods and leaks due to excessive groundwater extraction.
SoftBank managing director Masayoshi Son, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed al-Nahyan have been recruited as advisers to the project.
As the government struggles to reopen Southeast Asia’s largest economy, its energies are being used to combat the spiraling epidemic, which has killed more than 6,200 people, the highest figure in the region.
Normally, such a vital allocation has such a significant positive domino effect on the economy, yet disbursement of the government’s reaction to coronavirus stimulus is more urgent now, said Wellian Wiranto, economist at OCBC Bank.
Indonesia also cannot move its capital, as pandemic pressure on the national budget is causing a dizzying budget deficit, another economist said.
The recession may last longer than the government expects, until 2021, Said Enny Sri Hartati of the Institute for Economic and Financial Development.
“Anyone who talks about the new allocation of capital to the pandemic has gone mad,” he added.
(Interactive chart that tracks global coronavirus: Open tmsnrt.rs/3aIRuz7 in an external browser).
Editing through Ed Davies and Clarence Fernandez
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