Titus Jonathan's Stories

(published by The Jakarta Post on 1 Mar 2011. Click here ) President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) should take some advice from Winston Churchill: “In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.” “ One bullet is enough ,” are the right words for SBY to consider in relation to his party’s losses in the Bank Century bailout case last year. The battle itself, where the lawmakers in the House of Representative voted to determine whether the government’s decision to bail out the bank was right or wrong was truly absurd. How can something deemed as the truth be a matter of a vote? They fought for a belief and spent a lot of time and money doing so, and then the outcome was nothing. Today, everything is clear. After the House banged its gavel and stated that the government was wrong in its handling of the Bank Century bailout, so what? The noisy debate was only a reflection of their arrogance, and it was like they were asserting “who is more powerful than us?”. The winner ...

(published by The Jakarta Post on 18 Feb 2011. Click here ) After the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Feb. 11, Egyptians need to realize that the path to democracy that they have dreamed about for so long is still a long journey. If they are expecting democracy immediately after successfully toppling their president, who was in power for 30 years, they will very soon be disappointed. Mubarak is gone. The people are joyous and euphoric after their victory, but beware! That was just one day. There are hundreds and even thousands of days in the future. Egyptians should move forward but there is no toll road to a democratic destiny. We know that exchanging authoritarian rule with democratic rule is about dealing with chronic illness, and it is painful and everyone needs to understand this. All the media in the world had headlines about Mubarak’s resignation, underlining the word “freedom”. On Feb. 11, after Vice President Omar Suleiman announced that Mubarak had decided ...