Political Awareness In University: An Experience In Indonesia

A few months back, I was in Jakarta with some friends. Coincidentally, we were there a few weeks before they would run a ‘Pilkada’ (Pemilihan Kepala Daerah), an election to elect a new head for a city. The Pilkada was for the city of Kota Depok which is located about a few hours drive away from the city centre of Jakarta. During the weekend I visited Universitas Indonesia (UI), a local university there to see some friends and surprisingly, on a Sunday, there were a lot of students lingering around. I walked around to found out that there was actually some kind of festival happening on the campus. The festival was called Rock The Vote Indonesia.

Rock The Vote Indonesia is a very interesting programme initiated by the Center For Election and Political Party (CEPP), an institute in UI. It is a programme that promotes education about politics, the democracy system, and specifically, the complex election system they have in Indonesia. There were performances from the students, many exhibitions, and educational booths.

One thing that caught my attention was a booth that asks; “What do you think is the biggest issue in Kota Depok?” and there were about 10 different boards with facts about education, transportation, family, and many other issues. Students would walk into the booth, then the volunteers would give each student three straws. The students then will have to vote using the straws, put them on the boards, on issues they believe are the most problematic in Kota Depok.

There was also a booth to demonstrate how the voting process would go. My friends and I did the mock voting process, and me being a person who has never voted before, found it quite fun and very educational. A few minutes later, people would take their seats and focus on the stage. The most surprising of all, there was a dialogue, involving the two different parties that were competing against each other on the stage. Moderated by a political science professor, the session went very well and in a very academic manner.

Some people might ask, what is so interesting about people doing awareness campaigns on campus? Well, Rock The Vote Indonesia has been organizing this event on 45 different campuses and 33 provinces in Indonesia. To clear things up, (except for the booths set up by the candidates) the campaign was not about promoting a certain political party, or to tell the students who they should vote for. The campaign was completely about educating the young people about the political system in Indonesia

Seeing all that, I thought of how different things are back here in Malaysia. It has been a while since the last time we saw candidates of an election having healthy dialogues on what they would do if they got the seat, why the people should vote for them and all those kind of things. It has also been a while since we saw a campaign focusing on political awareness and education being organised here in Malaysia on a large scale.

We don’t talk about having this kind of campaigns in the campuses; we all know how the campuses in Malaysia are like. We would see photos of our current ministers going in and out of schools and universities, while the politicians from the oppositions will not get the same opportunities, even for any good causes. We would see politicians from one side engaging with young people in established educational institutions while the politicians from the oppositions will never be allowed to even step in any of those institutions.

The major difference between the people of Indonesia and Malaysia is we have been living with the mindset that the government is no different with a political party while the people in Indonesia, they do not even care which political party you are from. They have been dealing with a lot of elections since their independence days, going through different phases of governments. The people of Indonesia knows how to treat an election well. As a few years back, there would be Pilkada almost every day in all 34 provinces of Indonesia.

Being a student, I am very impressed as well with how they are trying so hard to educate the youth on their election system and also political values. From what I experienced, the students on the UI campus were mostly aware of what is going on in their country and how they can make things better. I am pretty sure we cannot say the same thing with the majority of university students here in Malaysia. University students in here, we are usually being fed with a very bias political programmes in the campus. 


Well, after all, Indonesia is a huge country and all the things I’ve said in here might not apply to most part of it. But from what I’ve seen and experienced, politically, things are going pretty well with the youth of their country. Rock The Vote Indonesia is a very good campaign that we might need a similar initiative to be organized in Malaysia, if not in campuses, in different areas that need more political education, awareness and with less political party involvement. Another thing I’ve learned is that Malaysia and Indonesia, we might recognize them as being neighbours geographically, but when it comes to the level of political awareness among the people, we are far from being neighbours. We are very much left behind but hey there’s always hope, right?

"1MDB? TPPA? Nah, I'll pass."

I couldn’t care less about how issues, being typically, an issue, got talked so much all over the social media. 1MDB, TPPA, the education system, the JPA false alarm, and so many other headlines which are not even academic or should I say; undebatable. Undebatable in a sense of how unnecessary certain issues can be, from how irrelevant the sources can be, up to how silly the reaction from the netizens can be.

We all have been very familiar to all these situations right? We are Malaysians after all and in this small country, we can’t really avoid ourselves from being caught up in situations that might have this tendency to being asked “Hey have you heard about this?” or “Have you watched that video on that facebook page?” and being as Malaysian as we could, as respectful as we are, it’s pretty hard to avoid this kind of situations.

"Everyone gets to be a star"

I tried so hard to relate this small part of this article to the song ‘Everyone Gets A Star’ written by Albert Hammond Jr, which has the lyrics; “These guys have all got problems

These guys have all got their problems.” But it only works for these two lines and another two that says; “Although you're getting angry, I know everyone gets a star.” I mean, just look at this and think about how it would be very perfect if the wording was meant to sound; “I know, everyone gets to be a star.”

Let’s just look back at how our social media really works these days. We would open our Facebook app, scroll throught the News Feed and read along all the posts that appear on the feed. The best thing about this is that other people keep on sharing other posts, or even videos, and this is how an issue usually got spread out like wildfire.

But hey, everything must have its good sides, and not just bad sides, right? I like some campaigns on the internet, which as the nature of a campaign, it has to go viral. Some of the campaigns like Pseudoscience, ‘Kempen Semak Status Hadis Sebelum Sebarkan’ and some medical officers who post things educating the public and busting myths in our culture are good examples on how to use the internet correctly.

What I would like to imply on this ‘Facebook Effect’ is how people nowadays, the youth especially, they go around and live on following the issues that have gone viral all over the social media. What I like the most about this is that every single Facebook user has the right to voice out their opinions and this is the most interesting part, where every user has their own rights to be a star, on their Facebook account at least.

It’s also very fortunate that on Facebook, there’s hardly any limit on how many posts a user can publish per day. So let’s move to Twitter. Twitter is a place that I like very much. 140 characters, and everyone gets to argue on things, on issues, and the discussions can get very lively with other people joining in.

But with 140 characters?! We can’t even put a full proper sentence in there and people take Twitter discussions seriously nowadays. There are people who claim to be trolls, who fake their silly tweets just to get attention from the other Twitter users, and there are also people who claim to fight for their rights, also in Twitter. Go create a Twitter account if you don’t have one and you’d be surprised just how fast you can be a star in that ecosystem.

Consume and costume lifestyle

People like to do businesses nowadays. There are a lot of new cafes, foodtrucks, small shops and even new online shops in the internet. The number doesn’t seem to be declining at the moment. People sell stuff, and there are some other people who do not sell, they buy and consume stuff.

Everyone has the ego to always look good, or to be appreciated by their colleagues, their classmates and all, so the ego has to always be fed. We end up following trends, following what’s the ‘in thing’ today, buying things we don’t even need, and showing it all on our social media. Of course, we have the rights to publish anything we like right on our social acconts? Because that’s our personal space and no one have the rights to tell me what to share and what not to share.

Yes, and we, some other people who observe, are kind of worried with how this trend is currently going. I call this lifestyle as ‘consume and costume lifestyle’. Let’s face the fact, our youth are so easily affected by what other people are currently doing, regardless of whether it is a good or a bad thing. Just look at how the Vape thing got so much attention from the youth. They are now the sellers, and also the buyers of this ‘vape industry’.

Where do we go from here?

So I talked about how worrying the way we use our social media and the lifestyle of majority; not all of the youth in our country today. Where do we go from here? I didn’t separate the youth in two groups, the ones who go to university and the ones who don’t. I don’t see any need or any significance in classifying these two groups. Why? Because you and I, being a university student doesn’t make us any better than the other group.

Look at our universities. Look at all the official programs initiated by the HEP. Look at all those students who kind of work for the HEP. Look at how inefficient all the programs have been. Look at how many of those programs, that fill the time of the students, even on weekends, are actually non-intellectuals.

Our universities have so many flaws they need new direction on where they are heading to. It’s sad that students always have to look at outside of the campus to actually go to intellectual-based programs, to go to current issues forum, to go to listen to presentation of NGO’s surveys. They are university students, they have the rights to actually be fed with intellectuals and academic stuff. But what if the university is always taking the students to do something else, let’s say for example; entrepreneurship? I’m not saying like entrepreneurship is a bad thing to educate the students but this is not the direction a university should take.

What’s the relation between university not doing what a university should do, to ‘consume and costume lifestyle’ and the social media? The youth. The 18-30 years old age group. We used to have this kind of thought where we would say that university students are always better than the others. But today it isn’t always the case. The youth are the main users of the social media or the internet. The youth are the ones who are directly affected with so many problematic national issues. The youth are the ones who are needed to be there, to be vocal and academic on dealing with these issues. But where do we go now? The university doesn’t seem to hold any solution to any of these problems.

Everything is political

I remember going to a talk in 2015, where the speaker said ‘everything is political’ a few times in his talk. That caught up my attention, and even from a muslim perspective, we cannot deny the fact that our beloved Prophet Muhammad s.a.w. was being political even before he became a prophet. Being political is a big sunnah, apart from other very important Sunnah, and that’s basically it.

Unfortunately, how frequent can we hear someone that’s around 18-30 years old age group, saying something like “I don’t’ talk politics”, “You can talk to me about anything but please not politics”, and the most favourite of all; “Politics is too dirty”. This is what our youth has been thinking about politics, about nasional isssues and almost about anything that has the word government and politics in it.

This is not an exclusive problem among those who do not go to university. Trust me, university students are also thinking the same way as well. They do not hold the idea that everything is political! Instead they keep on thinking on how to raise their own money, their own survival. That’s the reality today, we all know that. 

Everyone is struggling with the bad economy. But that’s never an excuse for us, or for all the university students to live only with their own lives in their head. The people out there are hoping for the educated ones to at least do something, change the policy, recover the economy, make a lot of job opportunities for all Malaysians, but hey the university students mostly don’t want to even think about it.

Most of them are so busy on the social media, creating funny contents, sharing their own achievements, buying stuff they don’t even need, pampering themselves with good electronic gadgets, and do all of this while saying “We don’t do politics”.

Maybe they just want to be a star. I remember reading tweets saying some vloggers got married and guess what, a few days later, a video was out. A video about how simple and minimalist their wedding was. Good message of course, but seriously? After all, they are stars to a certain group of people.

A group of people who couldn’t care less about what’s going on in the country. Or maybe a group of people who would just say things about issues and be a star on their personal social accounts.

Wake up. Take some time to admit the fact that everything is political. Take part in politics (which doesn’t mean you have to be in any political party). Be the voice of the youth in politics. If the youth do not realize this reality, maybe one day it would be very hard for us to be our own star as there might be tight internet surveillance in our country.

It might be very tough for any of us to start our own business as the economy might collapse if things stay the same for a long time. It might also be very difficult for us to keep going with the ‘consume and costume’ lifestyle. Well, maybe some youth will not even care, as they might be from rich families. But most of us, we don’t live with much wealth in hand. The youth should at least do something, play a part and be political.

Too Smart

Hello netizens,
It has been a while isn’t it?

Let’s just start with some updates.

I will be 22 years old in a few months time.
I am now married for almost two years.
I just finished my first degree which took me three years to complete.
I gained so much weight in the process
(and I am not bothered.)

This urge to start writing again has been bugging me since quite a while. It’s true they say once you start growing up you can hardly have time for yourself. After all, the process itself should be an interesting one so I’m keeping myself busy with all the necessary stuff on this long journey of just being alive and making my mark.

One thing I noticed while I was off is that people nowadays are getting smarter or maybe I shall say, too smart. Informations are easier to access, news are quicker to being spread and people are now only a click away from being a nationwide sensation. Too smart in taking advantage of these developments, you see? Be it the politicians, the business people or even the (countless) public figures.

Maybe I just miss those days when smartphone application like WhatsApp was used to actually have real conversations with family and friends instead of how it is used today.

That was five, six years back. But….

“If you are thankful, I will surely give you more and more..”
[14:7]

There you go.