We Fight for a Reason, Not for a Person: Sandiaga Uno

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - What do you fight for in life? Indonesia's former vice presidential candidate Sandiaga Uno has the answer to this question.

According to Sandiaga Uno, "we have to fight for a reason. Do not fight for a person!" This message was a tweet that he posted on his Twitter account on July 18, 2019.

This running mate of Chief Patron of the Great Indonesia Movement (Gerindra) Prabowo Subianto for the 2019 Presidential Elections argued that fighting for a person would make a person easily get disappointed.

"However, if we fight for a reason, we shall never stop struggling for it," said Uno who lost the recent presidential race against the Joko Widodo (Jokowi)-Ma'ruf Amin pair.

Instead of being dragged into a long disappointment with the recent election result, he remains optimistic with all action programs that he has initiated and proposed to the public.

He, for instance, believes that the Ready-to-Work and OK OCE programs would be able to provide community members with more job opportunities.

These proposed action programs would also be able to boost the development of Indonesia's small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

Unlike Prabowo Subianto who has hinted his willingness to join the Jokowi-Amin administration, Uno has frankly expressed his keenness to stay outside the government.

"I will prove that we can offer solutions to problems that our people are facing, especially in eradicating unemployment, though we stay outside the government," he said in his recent tweet as revealed in https://twitter.com/sandiuno.

From the beginning of the 2019 Presidential Election's campaign trail, Sandiaga Uno has pledged to go ahead with the programs he has initiated and proposed to the public regardless of whatever the presidential election result the Prabowo-Sandi pair would have.

The Prabowo-Sandiaga pair has received their destiny. The General Elections Commission (KPU) has officially declared the Jokowi-Amin pair as Indonesia's president-elect and vice president-elect following the Indonesian Constitutional Court's (MK's) ruling on the presidential election result dispute on June 27, 2019.

The MK's nine judges rejected in totality the Prabowo-Sandi pair's petition. They contended that the Prabowo-Sandi camp's allegation that structured, systematic, and massive electoral frauds had been found in the convening of the recent presidential election could not be legally proven, so it was not legally acceptable.

The ruling paved the way for confirming the victory for the Jokowi-Amin pair based on the final tally announced on May 21, 2019.

The final tally declared at around 1:28 a.m. local time on May 21 indicated the Jokowi-Amin pair had secured 85 million votes, or 55.5 percent of the national vote, as against the contenders Prabowo-Sandi's 68 million votes, or 44.5 percent.

Apart from the Prabowo-Sandi pair's destiny, ANTARA learned that during the presidential campaign trail, Sandiaga Uno had ever conveyed and highlighted several economic programs that he and Prabowo were keen to do.

SMEs

Among the programs that he had ever delivered to public were protecting and revitalizing traditional markets; and boosting the development of community markets' cooperatives and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) for saving our people's economic sector.

He further highlighted the importance of stabilizing rising and fluctuating prices of basic commodities at traditional markets because the relatively stable prices of staple foods would later help maintain the purchasing power of the people at large and boost the people's economic activities.

This successful businessman and Jakarta's former deputy governor is also keen to boost a sustainable growth of the people's economy, and keep encouraging Indonesian millennials to become trained entrepreneurs to help create job opportunities for others.

The "OK OCE" movement for creating "One Center for Entrepreneurship" for one city and district needs to be pushed to boost the growth and development of SMEs and business clusters based on each of the regions' business potentials.

If the region has vast potentials in plantations, the agropreneurs will be pushed to become well-developed there.

To this end, it is indispensable to strengthen the village cooperatives' role in nurturing and developing the spirit of entrepreneurship among young people as part of the OK OCE movement to accelerate the economic growth of villages.

Last but not least, in reducing economic disparity, he underlined a necessity of pushing a fair economic growth to increase, and boosting the development of Indonesia's competitive sectors, such as agriculture, forestry, fishery, tourism, marine, cattle breeding, and creative industry and economy.

Sandiaga Uno has conveyed his keenness to stay outside the government but he pledges to keep fighting for a reason by offering concrete solutions to Indonesia's problems.

ANTARA