President Joko Widodo has landed in Bali.
The Indonesian leader touched down on Thursday and has been very busy since his arrival.
Other than taking a photo-op to shop at a mall in Kuta (hey, he’s just like us, but not really), Jokowi has seen the distribution of 5,093 land certificates to Bali residents.
Jokowi Belanja Kaos dan Jaket di Mal Kuta Bali https://t.co/OLZfTcG9zt pic.twitter.com/IrWME9EJ3y
— Harun Saidi (@harun_saidi) August 4, 2017
The president spoke at Renon Square in Bali’s capital city, Denpasar, on Friday afternoon about a national strategic program to generate deeds for land not under certificate. Jokowi said these 5,093 deeds freshly issued are just the start of something bigger.
The president promised that all land in Bali will be certified by 2019.
During his speech, Jokowi cited a startling figure, saying that there as may as 126 million plots of land in Indonesia, but only deeds for 46 million of them.
In Bali alone, the government has set a target to distribute 200,000 land deeds by 2019.
“Out all the regions, Bali is the fastest. By 2019, everything will already be distributed. For others, not until 2025,” Bey Machmudin, spokesperson for the presidential secretariat, said on Friday.
Jokowi further explained that the government is prioritizing the distribution of land deeds to protect property rights and ease the resolution of land disputes.
“If you have a certificate, it’s good, there will be no more disputes, because there are thousands of disputes to be resolved. The dispute must be stopped with a land certificate.”
Land deeds themselves, however, don’t always seem to make everything better. Kampung Bugis, a village in Bali’s Serangan Island, was evicted en masse with no notice this past January, when the deed holder suddenly decided she did not want other people living on her land anymore—though the families in the village had been there for generations. It came down to the land deed: that out of the whole village, just this one woman had the deed for the land that housed 36 families.
Regardless, during his speech on Friday, the president also reminded people to keep their new deeds safe.
“Please look for plastic to keep them in so they don’t get damaged. And make photocopies so that if lost, they can easily be handled again by BPN (the National Land Agency).”
