Nick Cumming-Bruce
President Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie’s enthusiasm is infectious, but his head- spinning monologues have the power to wear anyone down – as Margaret Thatcher discovered while drumming up business in Indonesia.
Purposeful as ever on a mid-1980s visit, she strode around the Bandung aviation plant with Habibie trotting beside her, talking furiously. Visibly flagging, she emerged an hour later with the impish Habibie still in full flow.
The day may soon arrive when Habibie looks back on a sunny August morning in 1995 as the glorious climax of his career, not the dramatic moment on May 28 this year when, with a Koran held over his head, he took the oath of office to replace Asia’s longest-serving ruler, Suharto, as president of Indonesia.
Then, in the pleasant hill town of Bandung, with Suharto and the cream of Indonesian business and politics seated under canvas awnings, the doors of an aircraft hangar drew back and a modest- looking turboprop aircraft rolled on to the apron.
Indonesia had been preparing for weeks for the inaugural flight of the N-250, a 50- seat commuter plane wholly designed by Habibie’s aerospace organisation.
The launch was timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of independence. Billions of dollars were being spent on building Indonesian planes and launching an industrial revolution.
The revolution that eventually occurred was not a technological one, but a popular revolt against the cronyism and excesses of a despotic regime.
In the dying hours of the Suharto regime, with students occupying the rubber-stamp Parliament and mobs looting and destroying whatever they could get their hands on, Habibie made an impassioned appeal to his old mentor to be given the ultimate reward for his loyal service: the presidency.
But as he stepped forward to take over this country of 202-million people, he may have found real power already in the hands of the military.
It was much easier being “technology tsar” for more than 20 years and boss of an aircraft manufacturing company, IPTN.
This was just one of many hi-tech ventures which “Professor, Doctor, Engineer Habibie”, as the state media describe him, conjured up for his master.
He launched a shipbuilding company that would one day build supertankers to carry the nation’s oil. Undaunted by the proximity of volcanoes and earthquake faults, he backed the idea of building nuclear power stations.
He even conceived a wacky “zig-zag theory”‘ of economics, extolling the benefits of wild fluctuations in interest rates.
Critics regard these as strange fixations for a land of rice paddies and tropical forests struggling to lift the world’s fourth-largest population from poverty. But with Suharto behind him, the extra noughts on Habibie’s bills just didn’t seem to count.
As far as anyone can tell – the company books are not open to public scrutiny – IPTN has never sold a passenger plane on the open market or turned a profit, yet Suharto was willing to ransack an environmental fund to find it extra capital.
And when an uppity minister of finance wanted Habibie’s shipbuilding concern to pay $80-million in back taxes, he could depend on Suharto to send the miscreant packing.
Suharto championed the maverick prodigy from his early teens, and Habibie seems to have felt himself a man apart. His authorised biography tells how the child Habibie never went out to play like other children when he finished his homework – he preferred his Meccano set.
Awed by the wartime exploits of the Lutwaffe’s ME-109 fighter, he went to Germany in the late 1940s to study engineering. Zealous study earned him a PhD and a job at Messerschmitt, until Suharto brought him back.
Since then he has been the target equally of plaudits and brickbats. His fizzing energy and restless imagination have won him admiration as a visionary but also derision as the nation’s most eccentric politician.
His hi-tech dreams gained political currency as a vehicle for Indonesia’s Muslim modernisers even as they were criticised by economic technocrats.
He is touchy about his diminutive height, and used to carefully watch the reaction of visitors to the model aircraft crowding his desk top. If they smirked, he never forgave or forgot.
As president, Habibie will face pressures of an altogether different magnitude. His profligate ways make his dearest projects targets for the International Monetary Fund, and international financial markets savaged the currency in January when Suharto picked him for vice-president.
These are hardly the references that will help Habibie halt Indonesia’s giddy plunge towards economic collapse. The banking system is for all practical purposes dead, he has a paltry $10-billion or less in foreign reserves to work with, and the number of people thrown out of jobs and on to Indonesia’s streets of desperation is rising by the day.
Almost the only things working in the past week or two have been the presses printing a currency that is buying less and less. Food is still arriving in markets, but as prices soar towards inflation rates of 70% to 100%, Habibie may yet face hungrier, angrier crowds than those who shattered Suharto’s regime.
Habibie has pulled some highly competent people into his Cabinet to try to turn the tide, but those he really needs are keeping their distance from a president with fewer skills and as many pressures as his predecessor.
The reform-minded students who beat down Suharto’s presidency have little time for an heir they see as a product of the culture of corruption and nepotism they are bent on rooting out. Nor do many of Indonesia’s politically powerful generals, including the army commander, General Wiranto.
Trapped between the two, with little grassroots support, Habibie may go down as the shortest president in Indonesian history – in more ways than one.