Unspun

President SBY's ultimatum to the Bandung Governor to virtually clean up his act by 23rd of May or have his job of cleaning up the mounting piles of rubbish in the city taken away from him is a breath of fresh air.

For too long, the Governors and other petty officials have acted like powers onto themselves, ruling over their fiefdoms with impunity. The results are dysfunctional cities. Most Indonesian cities are unnecesarily unkempt. There is no proper spatial planning, enforcement of building and land use bylaws are non existent, maintenance is abhorrently absent, even in the better districts of town.

All of this makes the majority of us live in a context where the environment, already unattractive, gets progressively degraded. What is needed is for the government, antional or local, to get tough and change the context whereby people relate to their environment.

If the context changes (refer to the Power of Context in Malcom Gladwell's Tipping Point) then there is hope for change.

But it is a sad day when, as admitted by SBY himself, the President of a country has to handle the rubbish. He needs to get rid of the trash sitting behind officious desks, then the President would not have to lower himself to the tqask of a garbologist.