by TERRY LACEY
“The tide is high but I`m holding on. I´m gonna be your number one.” So sang the girl band Atomic Kittens. Indonesia is entering what will become its nuclear age, driven by a huge expansion in energy, with key companies like Pertamina and ministries like Finance, Trade, Energy and Mines led by a new and growing band of women breaking though the glass ceiling.
After initial doubts, Karen Agustiawan keeps her job as president director of Pertamina, Indonesia’s top state-owned oil and gas company, while all the directors around her have been washed away by a tsunami of change. Agustiawan is hardly alone across the government, a trend that US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton noted in a speech during her visit to Jakarta year ago as part of the new Obama administration.
“I have to compliment Indonesia for the growing role that women are playing at all levels of society,” Clinton said. “And a recognition of the role that women have to play and the opportunities for women to assume leadership positions as many of you in this room have done is another contribution that Indonesia is making. As I travel around the world over the next years, I will be saying to people, if you want to know whether Islam, democracy, modernity, and women’s rights can coexist, go to Indonesia.”
It has been a long time coming. Indonesian women, working for low wages, have provided the bulk of the work force in multinational factories since the 1970s, when the country started to to open to foreign investment. And, although to the outside world they are usually characterized in photos as wearing the hijab, called a jilbab in Indonesia, there are plenty of miniskirts and there is a growing if hard-fought sense of women’s role that belies their place in stricter Islamic societies. In Indonesia, often they are running things.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono reportedly understands that Pertamina could become a truly global oil, gas and energy company, pioneering renewable energy as well as optimizing gas and reducing the cost of oil imports. The failure to hold up oil-lifting against the trend of decline as reserves were exhausted reflected lack of thrust and investment, not just harder geology and deeper waters.
Now Pertamina will push oil-lifting back up from 174,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2009 to an estimated 193,900 bpd in 2010, seeking to become a global player in the Middle East or the Arab and Muslim world.
But these dreams are impossible if Pertamina, as the top state-owned enterprise in a clutch of increasingly profitable SOEs, is run in the style of an old boys club representing yesterday, as a milking cow for patronage, jobs for the boys and profits for the old elite. Agustiawan may be just the right kind of leader to change it.
State SOE Minister Mustafa Abubakar has now confirmed that the president director “will not be replaced” but will keep the job she took up in February 2009, while he confirmed that seven new directors will join Agustiawan on the Pertamina board, chosen from a list of 25 candidates, “Most of them are from internal Pertamina nominations.”
But she will still have to fight for progress against the conservative, under-qualified under-capacity male-dominated middle that holds back much of public enterprise and public administration.
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