Jokowi to improve single ID system

JAKARTA.  President-elect Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has said he plans to improve the country’s civil administration by perfecting the single identity-number system, which he will later use as a means to combat poverty and income disparities.

Andi Widjajanto, deputy of Jokowi’s Cabinet formation team, said on Thursday that Jokowi would set up a new ministry to manage civil administration.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s government has developed a database of citizens’ identity numbers, called the NIK. It is a digital system that produces identification numbers for all citizens that can facilitate services in immigration, taxation, banking, insurance, population censuses and ID cards.

However, the NIK has been deemed problematic, since the General Elections Commission (KPU) found errors in the data of more than 400,000 people during its preparations for the 2014 legislative election.

Another deputy in Jokowi’s transition team, Hasto Kristiyanto, said reliable population data could help the government design better state budget (APBN) plans.

“The APBN is for the people; it should not only comprise numbers and statistics,” he said.

Hasto said the transition team considered the civil and citizenship administrative directorate general at the Home Ministry as being unable to comprehensively manage data about the population.

Currently, the transition team is working with the University of Indonesia’s (UI) demographics institution on how to manage population data and produce policy proposals.

“We’re very concerned about the demographic issues. Therefore, all of the programs that we are designing here are based on demographic information provided by the university,” he said.

The civil ministry is one of several new ministries being planned by the new government. The other new ministries in the offing are a creative economy ministry, agrarian ministry, maritime affairs ministry, higher education and research ministry, primary and secondary education ministry and food security ministry.

Jokowi previously said that he would retain the current number of ministries by merging a number of ministries that he considered redundant.