Jokowi Clarifes His Statement on Prabowo`s Land Ownership

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Incumbent presidential candidate Joko “Jokowi” Widodo clarified his statement he mentioned in Sunday’s presidential debate against Prabowo Subianto regarding land ownership.

Jokowi said that he personally has no issue with the ownership status of the land and that mentioning Prabowo’s hundreds of thousands of hectare ownership was in the context of responding to a question in the debate.

“I actually don’t have any issue. Did I say that I had an issue with [Prabowo’s land ownership?] I didn’t.” said Jokowi on Wednesday at the Hotel El Royale Kelapa Gading, North Jakarta. His statement is in line with Vice President Jusuf Kalla’s response earlier.

Read also: List of Lands Owned by Prabowo Subianto

Furthermore, Jokowi implied that his answer in the debate was a direct response to Prabowo criticizing the government’s ongoing land certificate distribution program, which he argued is useless and will only result in depleting land ownership across the country.

“I was only stating that Prabowo owns a certain amount of land (following his statement that lands would be depleted). I am not arguing whether it is legal or illegal. So don’t drag it out of context,” said Jokowi.

During Sunday’s debate, Jokowi revealed that Prabowo Subianto owns 220 thousand hectares of business permit land in East Kalimantan and 120 thousand hectares in Aceh.

The ‘land ownership fiasco’ resulted in the Tim Advokasi Indonesia Bergerak (TAIB) reporting Jokowi to the Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) for an alleged attack on a personal issue.

DEWI NURITA