A quake village pays for its own recovery while flagship programmes get billions

Five weeks after the magnitude 7.7 earthquake in East Nusa Tenggara, the recovery in Satar Punda village is still stuck on basics: food, clean water, and somewhere dry to sleep. Nikkei Asia reports from the village, where chief elder Fransisko Edwin Budiman is dealing with a problem that has nothing to do with geology. Villages are being left to cover the recovery bill after public money was redirected to the president's flagship programmes.

A flagship programme is a president's signature project, the kind that gets paid first. Prabowo Subianto has several and they are large. Nikkei puts the village cooperative drive at about 14 billion dollars, and a plan for international financial centres in Jakarta and Bali at about 28 billion. Both are meant to serve a 6 per cent growth target, which means making the whole economy 6 per cent bigger in a year. Nikkei calls that target ambitious. Disaster recovery has no flagship attached to it.

Rebuilding after a quake is mostly paid with money that moves from the centre out to provinces, districts and villages. When the centre has already promised billions to its own projects, the items that get squeezed are the small and unglamorous ones: tarpaulins, water tanks, a road cleared so a truck can reach a hamlet. Nikkei reported in late August that about 180,000 people were still in makeshift shelters two weeks after the quake, with a strong El Nino drying out the same province. The distance between that and a budget already committed elsewhere is what this report measures.

Why it matters

If your family lives in one of these villages, ask the village office whether repair money is coming as a special transfer from Jakarta or out of the village's own budget, because that answer decides whether you wait months or years. Many village budgets are already carrying the cooperative programme, so there may be less there than people assume. The order of priorities on show here is not only about one quake; it is the same order the next flood or fire will meet.