THERE was quite a buzz recently when Indonesian President Joko Widodo landed in Central Kalimantan to inspect Palangkaraya, the provincial administrative centre.
Purposely built in 1957, Joko was eyeing the possibility of the city as a future national capital to replace teeming Jakarta and relieve the overpopulated Java.
Joko’s Palangkaraya visit was billed as a view towards giving the capital-shift idea a presidential push.
Given how the idea has waxed and waned over the decades, the latest official nudge was for real, finally rolling the ball to turn the dream into reality?
There is much beyond Indonesia to pin hopes that this time will be different. Joko, after all, is just into his second and final term and this can be a legacy with greater lasting imprint by setting in motion the capital-shift idea.
There is understandable excitement all across Kalimantan over the possibility that it may one day soon be host to Indonesia’s capital. The region will not be a provincial backwater any longer.
The effects will be tsunami-like rippling through the whole region and even across the international border to this side of Borneo.
The possibility has already caught the imagination of the island’s powers-that-be.
Sarawak Chief Minister Datuk Patinggi Abang Johari Abang Openg, for example, recently let it be known that the state will put its growing reputation as a regional renewable energy powerhouse to good use to quench the thirst for electric power that millions of Indonesians flooding into a new national capital will immediately require.
“If they (the Indonesians) say they want power from us, we can supply to them,” said Abang Johari, noting that the first power-transmission interconnection to West Kalimantan from Sarawak as part of the Borneo power grid is already supplying electricity across the border.
Electricity supply from Sarawak is just a start. A construction boom as a new capital city is built almost from scratch will need copious quantities of building materials — among them cement, steel and timber — and Sarawak may be quite well-positioned to supply these at competitive prices.
This should provide further impetus for improvements to the transportation linkages throughout the vast but sparsely populated Borneo, the world’s third largest island.
Interest will not necessarily be whetted by businesses and investors from just the island itself.
A new capital city for Indonesia situated in Borneo may just be the very capital idea needed to develop an island more noted for exotic tribes and fabulous abundance of natural resources.
It will not come a moment too soon. One of the last development frontiers in Asia may finally be about to stir and secure its position as the centre of the region in more than just the geographic sense.
Rather than seeing so much of the vibrant economic activity of Asia pass it by each day, Borneo may yet become the latest regional industrial hub, its fabled mineral resources mined and processed on-site by industrial behemoths spurred by demand for clean and renewable energy.
There will be reason then to dust up a decades-old idea for a Pan-Borneo railway circling round the entire island, bringing in its wake untold new economic spin-offs and opportunities.
The idea should massively re-energise Asean industrial cooperation and coordination which seem to have waned since the time of Asean industrial projects in the grouping’s earlier years.
Malaysia, of course, possibly has a pivotal edge in contributing to this push, given its record in the successful, almost seamless and speedy shift of our administrative capital out of Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya.
Incidentally, even the Philippines is mulling moving its massive national bureaucracy out of horrendously overcrowded and congested Manila to the New Clark City, a US$14-billion project on the site of a former American military base 75 miles outside Manila.
Just last week, Philippine Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said relocating the administrative capital to Clark, reportedly designed with Putrajaya as the blueprint, “makes a lot of sense”.
Clark should be much in the news later in the year as its first phase — a brand-new sports centre with a 20,000-seat stadium — opens to host the Southeast Asian Games.
Malaysian-owned MTD Philippines is scheduled to complete this first phase of New Clark City in two months.
As Dominguez said on his recent site inspection: “…we laid the groundwork in January of 2018. And in 18 months, this is what you have. This is the result of good planning and excellent management.”
The regional thirst for infrastructure works remains unsated and new capital cities fit in well.
The writer views developments in the nation, the region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak