LIKE many politicians, President Joko Widodo of Indonesia (known as Jokowi) enjoys being seen in a hard hat. On April 23rd he tweeted a photo of himself resplendent in a gleaming white one to his 10m followers while visiting the site of a future airport in Central Java. The previous week he posted several photos of his trip to another airport being built, this time in West Java, complete with a hat and an orange construction vest. (Pictured is Jokowi on yet another such outing, to a mass-transit railway project in Jakarta last year.) More surprisingly for a head of state, many responses to these tweets have been broadly positive. The overwhelming impression among Indonesians is that their president gets shovels into the ground, as well as inspecting their use before cameras.
After years of relative neglect, the amount Indonesia spends on roads, railways, energy plants and the like has surged. Jokowi’s predecessors promised much but delivered little. But after he took office in 2014,...Continue reading
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