COVID-19: Red tape prevents laid-off, poor Indonesians from getting promised aid
22 April, 2020
For days, Mawarni have been trying to apply for the government’s pre-employment card programme, which allows her to have a benefit worth 3.5 million rupiah (US$215) over a four-month period.
“It is not a lot of money,” the 46-year-old mother of three told CNA. “It won’t be enough to put food on the table and pay my home rent.”
But with the COVID-19 outbreak forcing companies and businesses to lay off hundreds of thousands of staff in Jakarta, Mawarni - who like many Indonesians goes with one name - might use all of the help she will get.
The programme was part of President Joko Widodo’s campaign promises when he was re-elected this past year to stem unemployment. It had been originally designed to provide training for recent graduates and the unemployed.
However the president, popularly referred to as Jokowi, shifted the programme’s focus on Mar 31, significantly less than fourteen days after it had been launched, to aid those that lost their jobs due to the pandemic.
Because the programme was new, the federal government only started accepting applications on Apr 11 through a dedicated website.
This is bad news for Mawarni, a cook who was simply forced to take an unpaid leave when the restaurant where she worked closed its doors on Mar 24. She will not own a computer and her West Jakarta house has poor mobile data reception.
“I had to walk up to the primary road to get good Internet on my phone,” she bemoaned, adding that due to her being “technologically challenged”, she had to take her 16-year-old daughter along to help her with the procedure.
“I didn’t have even an email until now,” Mdm Mawarni said. “My daughter had to set up an email take into account me because you need an email to register.”
The woman described her connection with trying to use through the website as “frustrating”, adding that there have been moments when she could not even open the web site.
Even though she could access the web site, she could not made it past the sign up page since the activation link was never delivered to her email.
Mawarni said she was finally in a position to sign in last Wednesday (Apr 15) and spent thirty minutes filling the form.
But even after spending so enough time, effort and mobile data, it would likely have a while before she finally gets the money aid promised.
COMPLICATED BUREAUCRACY
The programme’s spokesman Panji Winanteya Ruky told CNBC Indonesia on Wednesday that his office would need to talk to the Ministry of Manpower and the Ministry of Social Affairs to verify the applications.
“Applicants must pass the verification process and a competence test, where they'll be judged based on how old they are, education level and other factors. We will look at the data provided by the Ministry of Manpower and present priority to personnel and businesses identified as being impacted by COVID-19,” he said.
“We may also check against the Ministry for Social Affairs database. We will prioritise those that haven’t received any social aid yet.”
The aid promised will not come solely in the sort of cash handouts, in line with the programme’s executive director Denni Purbasari in a press conference organised by the COVID-19 task force last Tuesday.
Purbasari said the programme was at first about providing skills and training to the unemployed, therefore 1 million rupiah of the 3.5 million rupiah pledged to each beneficiary would can be found in the sort of online courses and classes.
“We've over 900 classes on the web available. With each class costing 200,000 rupiah, beneficiaries reach take five classes,” she said.
“After completing the courses, then we begins disbursing 600,000 rupiah on a monthly basis for four months to a beneficiary’s bank-account or (digital wallet apps) OVO or GoPay.”
EFFECTIVENESS QUESTIONED
Jokowi said on Mar 31 that the federal government would use three different existing programmes to assist persons whose income are afflicted by the pandemic.
Apart from the pre-employment card programme, additionally, there are the family hope programme - made to help 10 million underprivileged pregnant women, infants and disabled - and the essential necessities card programme - made to help 20 million poor families with subsidised food and goods.
However, Jokowi were banking on the newly rolled-out pre-employment card programme as his main tool to weather the monetary impact COVID-19 had on an incredible number of Indonesians.
He said the federal government has earmarked 20 trillion rupiah for the pre-employment card programme, adding that it could benefit 5.6 million persons “primarily informal employees and micro and smaller businesses affected by COVID-19”.
But in practice, the programme is prioritising staff and businesses discovered by the Ministry of Manpower which only monitors the formal sector, as explained by the programme's people in-charge earlier.
Based on the Indonesian Statistics Agency, there are a lot more than 55 million personnel in the informal sector across the country.
“Even before COVID-19, the federal government has been criticised to be slow to distribute their aid programmes and fail to ensure that the aid is distributed to the proper people,” Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara, an economist from the Institute for Development of Economics and Finance told CNA.
The decision to help make the pre-employment card programme the go-to policy seems to be out of place, he said.
“The programme was made to improve the skills of the unemployed at the same time the economy was growing 5 %. During a time of crisis, people don’t need training, they need to eat,” he said.
The government also offers to make certain the other two programmes can effectively mitigate the monetary impact of COVID-19, Adhinegara added.
The government has raised the number of beneficiaries for the family hope programme and the basic necessities card programme by 30 per cent. How much benefits for both was also increased by 25 %.
“The government includes a lot of catching up to accomplish in deciding who these added beneficiaries are,” Adhinegara said. “ With limited budget, the federal government wants to be careful with the verification process however in so doing decreases the aid distribution.”
And the quantity of benefits people stand to create are also relatively small, said Adhinegara.
The family hope programme provides each beneficiary of between 2.4 million to 3 million rupiah a year, as the basic necessities card programme only hands out 1.8 million rupiah worth of goods over a maximum period of nine months.
According to the Jakarta Manpower Agency, by last week a lot more than 50,000 workers have already been laid off and 270,000 more have been forced to take unpaid leave.
UNCERTAIN TIMES
Siti Patonah, a housewife whose delivery worker husband has been forced to take unpaid leave, said she is unsure if the government would help her family.
In the eyes of the Jakarta Education Agency, her family is known as poor. Her nine-year-old daughter was allocated a cash aid of 250,000 rupiah per month to get uniforms, books and stationery.
But she does not know if the agencies in-charge of the three programmes agree. “I don’t harbour much hope,” she said.
The government has also promised to provide free electricity to 24 million homes and relax loan requirements, debt collections and late payment penalties for motorcycle taxi riders and micro together with small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs).
Igun Wicaksono, chairman of the Indonesian motorcycle taxi rider association (GARDA), said in practice things weren't as smooth.
“The free electricity is merely for those who are already under the electricity subsidy programme, not for many who recently loss their income like us,” Wicaksono, whose income has dropped by 80 % due to the pandemic.
“We barely make enough money to feed ourselves and buy fuel. We can’t pay our motorcycle loan but the creditors insisted that people should at least pay half of our instalment despite the government saying we don’t need to.”
Meanwhile, state-owned oil company Pertamina has promised to supply a 50 % discount to all motorcycle taxi riders.
But Wicaksono said many of his peers were disappointed to find later that the discount only applies to non-subsidised types of fuel which can cost one-and-a-half times a lot more than the subsidised fuel.
With Jakarta and its own surrounding suburbs banning motorcycle taxi riders from taking passengers, life has been problematic for motorcycle taxi riders, who is now able to only make deliveries.
“And it will become more difficult. A lot more laid off workers are now switching profession to become motorcycle taxi riders so competition will be stiffer,” he said.
“That’s why many of us have also applied for the money aid programmes. But we come to mind that there would be more bureaucracy before we finally receive cash. Meanwhile, we still have mouths to feed and bills to pay.”
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