Jokowi is carving a new Indonesian capital out of the Borneo jungle

IN A REMOTE part of Borneo, the chainsaw’s buzz will grow louder in 2023. This is the site of Nusantara, Indonesia’s new capital city, which is being carved out of the jungle.

In January 2022 the Indonesian parliament passed a law approving President Joko Widodo’s proposal to move the capital from Jakarta, the current seat of government, to eastern Borneo. Halfway through his second and last term in office, the president, known as Jokowi, hopes that Nusantara will secure his legacy as the country’s builder-in-chief. Although it will not be finished until 2045, the city already says a lot about its founder, a man of lofty ambitions and, at times, shoddy workmanship.

A former furniture-maker, Jokowi has dedicated his presidency to building things that are very large indeed. His government has constructed scores of airports, ports and dams and thousands of kilometres of toll roads. Nusantara—which will be three and a half times the size of Singapore—is not just the grandest infrastructure project of Jokowi’s presidency. It is “perhaps the biggest undertaking—both technocratically and politically—in Indonesian history,” write Yanuar Nugroho and Dimas Wisnu Adrianto of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, a Singaporean think-tank.

Its scale reflects Jokowi’s ambitions for it. He hopes that it will be the motor behind Indonesia’s future economic growth, creating more than 4m jobs in 20 years, as well as becoming the world’s greenest city and an inclusive symbol of the nation. By moving the capital from Java, an island which dominates the country’s politics and business, to the geographical centre of Indonesia, Jokowi wants to signal that he governs in the name of all Indonesians.

And yet Nusantara, like many of Jokowi’s initiatives, has been bedevilled by slapdash planning and a troubling disregard for democratic values. First there is the staggering price tag of 466trn rupiah ($29bn). The government says 80% of the cost will be borne by foreign investors—yet no serious offers seem to have emerged.

It is safe to assume that the government failed to consider the effects of all this construction on the rainforest, given that its environmental-impact assessment was published only after it decided to move the capital. Moreover, while deliberating over the move, parliament did not consult the public, as it is legally required to do.

Nothing captures the government’s top-down approach better than its decision to deny the new capital representative democracy. Jokowi has appointed a city chief who is accountable only to him. That is characteristic of a president who throws himself into a frenzy of building—but who has neglected the democratic foundations of the country.■