Sentenced To PTUN Dredging Total Mampang River, Ade Armando: Anies Baswedan's Program Stopped In Words, Completely Unclear!

DKI Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan (Photo: DKI Provincial Government Public Relations DOK/Diah Ayu/VOI)

JAKARTA - University of Indonesia lecturer Ade Armando also opened his voice regarding the decision of the Jakarta State Administrative Court (PTUN) which sentenced the Governor of DKI Jakarta Anies Baswedan to dredge the Mampang River completely.

According to Ade, with a fantastic APBD of IDR 80 trillion, Anie and his staff should be able to work on a good program to anticipate the Jakarta floods.

Unfortunately, according to Ade, Anies is more 'busy' managing words that are not a priority for DKI residents.

"During the campaign, Anies did say that flooding was not a natural disaster, it was a matter of water volume management, but in fact he has never implemented water flow management in a planned and systematic way," said Ade Armando, quoted via Youtube CokroTV, Sunday, February 20.

According to Ade, Anies' predecessors, such as Joko Widodo and Basuki Tjahaja Purnama alias Ahok, have controlled or overcome Jakarta floods through good programs.

For example, normalizing the river by widening the watershed so that water immediately flows into the sea, dredging the river and building sheet piles in a sustainable manner. Residents living on the banks of the river were also asked to move to flats with affordable rental schemes. Unfortunately, this strategy was not followed by Anies.

During the last campaign, Anies even 'harassed' this program under the pretext of fighting Sunnatullah. All over the world, said Anies, water from the sky should be absorbed into the earth, not flowed into the sea. Therefore what should be built should not be a giant culvert but ensure that water is quickly absorbed into the ground.

"Therefore, Anies said he would carry out a river naturalization program. The problem was stopped in words, we have never seen the DKI Provincial Government implementing river naturalization, talking about programs to revive river reservoir ecosystems and develop plants on the banks of rivers. Anies explained that naturalization means replacing river walls from concrete into green areas to protect the ecosystem, but everything is unclear and there is no sustainable execution," Ade criticized.

Ade said that one of the evidences was that Anies did not consider the Jakarta flood an urgent issue when in 2019 he cut the flood management budget from Rp. 850 billion to Rp. 350 billion.

"So it can be understood that when it rains heavily, Jakarta is submerged. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to teach anything after the 2020-2021 big flood. Anies has not also prepared steps to prevent disaster from repeating itself," said Ade.