Luhut Disbands Seven Ad Hoc Teams Formed by Sudirman Said
25 August 2016 12:00 WIB
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The acting Minister for Energy and Mineral Resources, Luhut Binsar Panjaitan, has decided to disband seven ad hoc task force that were created under his predecessor, Sudirman Said, on the grounds of 'organisational inefficiency'.
"I want all organisations and task forces to be organised and efficient - simple," said Luhut at his office on Wednesday, August 25, 2016. "We don't want to audit a complicated bureaucracy, only to find irregularities within it."
Out of the five unit and two ad hoc agency formed under Sudirman Said's tenure, one has been disbanded in 2015 - which is the Oil-and-Gas Management Reform Agency, headed by Faisal Basri at the helm. The team's primary task is to help the Energy and Mineral Resource's structural staff - essentially, a middleman for projects that require cross-sectoral coordination.
All of these units and agencies were formed through a Ministerial Decree - with the notable exception of the Performance Control Management Unit, which is formed by a Ministerial Regulation.
According to Luhut, the staggering numbering of redundancies in the Energy Ministry has decreased the efficiency of the entire organisation. The decision to band all these teams and task forces is the result of a deal between Luhut, the Secretary General for the Energy Minister, Mochamad Teguh Pamuji, and the Inspector General for the Energy Ministry, Mochtar Husein.
Luhut has demanded that the tasks that had been relegated to the now-defunct teams and agencies to be returned and completed by individuals who are actually responsible for the task at hand. "What we can fix, we'll fix," he said. "What can't be fix, has to go."
The Secretary General for the Energy Ministry Mochamad Teguh Pamuji said that the legal ground to disband the teams and agencies is a Ministerial Decree. Although Luhut is only an acting Minister, continued Pamuji, the President has decreed that he could act entirely in the capacity of the Minister Energy," he said.
The Executive Director for ReforMiner Institute, Komaidi Notonegoro, has asked Luhut to review his plan. "If the need to streamline and minimise the Ministerial budget is not pressing, then these teams and agencies should not be disbanded - they have tasks that there were perfectly capable of doing," said Notonegoro.
Notonegoro criticised Luhut and said that the acting Minister should evaluate the performance of the teams and agencies prior to their dissolution - as some of the teams have a proven performance record. Notonegoro also praised that the majority of the government's energy programs are spearheaded by these teams and agencies. "The dissolution of Petral, for example, could have never happened in the ad hoc teams did not propose it," he said.
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