CHAIRMAN of the Centra Initiative Management Board, Al Araf, revealed a number of chaotic and complicated governance of Prabowo Subianto’s defense sector. Previously, he said that Defense Minister Prabowo’s management of the defense sector was chaotic because he did not produce a defense white paper.
Al Araf said that one of the things that went wrong was the initial request for a budget for purchasing defense equipment of IDR 1,700 trillion. However, he said, the size of the defense planning request was chaotic.
“What we know is that the realization of the procurement of defense equipment actually caused many problems, for example the Mirage purchase scandal, which was suspected and then said to have been canceled, but in my opinion the process was postponed,” said Al Araf in the Medcom Newsmaker program, Saturday, March 16 2024.
He said the purchase price of the Mirage 2000-5 fighter jet from Qatar had skyrocketed many times over. In fact, in the past, this procurement was even rejected as a grant. Moreover, there is an alleged scandal in the purchase of the Mirage.
“Well, this becomes a problem if there is an error that this is canceled or postponed. In my opinion, this is something that is unclear and not clear enough because it is not easy to cancel or postpone an arms procurement process for which a contract has been signed,” he said.
The procurement of the Mirage aircraft is the second point regarding the faulty weapons procurement process. Then, the third is that the defense sector allocation is not prioritized.
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Finally, programs appear that are not important and are actually problematic. Like the cassava food estate in Central Kalimantan which failed. The program, which aims to achieve food security, actually damages the environment.
“The food estate failed and then it became an environmental problem and had a serious impact and the budget used was very large and there was deforestation and people didn’t know where the felled trees went,” said the Imparsial researcher.
Fourth, Al Araf noted that many of Prabowo’s programs were actually a burden on the defense sector. Such as building national defense reserve components. According to him, this program is problematic because it uses quite a large budget in one year.
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“So during Pak Prabowo’s time there was complexity and complexity in the complex management of the defense sector,” he said.
Al Araf said that what was no less complicated was the alleged involvement of third parties in the procurement of defense equipment. One example is the alleged involvement of PT TMI.
Likewise, with the planning to purchase the Mirage aircraft, it is suspected that there were private brokers who were very visible in the fighter jet procurement process. This, he said, was the scandal that became complicated during the Prabowo era and it all boiled down to money.
“This is a problem, we know that in the defense equipment procurement space there is a dark side in that sector,” he concluded. (Z-7)
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