The term ‘blusukan’ has become popular since Joko Widodo known as ‘Jokowi’
was being inaugurated as Jakarta Governor. Jokowi used blusukan as his
leadership style. According to what jokowi has done, blusukan is directly comes
to the people’s place especially the grassroot ( wong cilik), in slums area, rivers
side, garbage dumps, and others to know what are their problems and have a
dialogue with the people in order to make the right policy. More or lees this
style of leadership has sent Jokowi to Win the race of Presidential election in
2014. Regardless that jokowi used blusukan as an image or not, but this
leadership style is very effective and loved by the people. This is an
effective style because the leader can know the problem faced by the people
exactly, not just from the report from the bureaucreacy because we know that
sometimes the bureaucreacy just reports the good thing as ‘ABS’ (asal bapak
senang) in indonesian term. This essay will try to look the similiarity of
blusukan and servant leader as a concept of Islamic leadhersip style.
Blusukan is a Javanese
word, blusukan comes from the main word ‘blusuk’ which means “mlebu ing’ in Javanese
or entry (come in), and then plus suffix –an becoming blusukan, this means an
activity done by someone to enter some places in order to get something. As
leadhersip style Blusukan means a style of leadership that comes to the people
place directly in order to know, to hear, to talk, with the people to make a
good policy to inspire development programs that will be implemented, and to
know the effect of the programs that being implemented or as an evaluation of
program that is applied. So the blusukan
needs the leader to come to the people place, not the opposite. The leaders in
blusukan point of view are becoming a servant of the people. So the leaders
serve the people not the people serve the leader.
Leader and Leadership
are very important in Islam. In most circumstances in life, Muslims are urged
to appoint a leader and to follow him. According to the Prophet Muhammad SAW,
Muslims must appoint a leader during a trip, select a leader to lead the
prayer, and choose a leader for other group activities. One of the concepts of
leadership in Islam is servant leader, a leader who serves for his follower.
Servant leader is an Islamic leadership style, as what Prophet Muhammad once
said “The servant of the people is their leader”. According to this, the whole
purposes of leadership are to serve the people. One of the leaders in Islamic
history that implemented the concept of servant leader is umar ibn Al-khattab. Umar
is the figure of a leader who understood the interest and the needs of his
people, although he lived in poor condition. Umar often got around and
investigated the condition of his people in the night, this what we know as
‘blusukan’. So, Blusukan has sameness with the servant leader. Both of them are
oriented to the people’s need and interest.