JAKARTA ¨C Indonesia¡¯s president is rushing to reassure investors and bureaucrats about his $32 billion new capital city in a malaria-prone pocket of Borneo after the resignations of two officials overseeing the plan raised fresh doubts about its future.
President Joko Widodo¡¯s announcement that he will start working next month from an office in Nusantara, a giant construction site over 1,200 kilometers from the current capital, Jakarta, is unlikely to allay fears about his legacy project, analysts say.
¡°Investor confidence has dropped, I think. They were already in doubt and in ¡¯wait-and-see¡¯ mode, partly because of the unclear land status, partly because of a lack of transparency in governance of the new capital,¡± said Yanuar Nugroho, the president¡¯s former deputy chief of staff.
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