When I last visited North Penajam Paser, or P.P.U. as it is known to those limited few who have heard of it, in 2016, the easiest way to get there was by longboat. The harbor had all the attributes of harbors the length and breadth of “outer island” Indonesia — three or four food stalls shaded by recycled election banners; 10 or 12 friendly louts wearing soccer T-shirts and Monster Mash shorts, sitting astride their motorbikes and smoking without conviction; one or two S.U.V.s with the red license plates of officialdom, in which drivers waited for V.I.P.s returning from somewhere more happening.

“Capital in waiting” it certainly was not. Even most Indonesians would have had trouble locating it on a map — that is, until this week, when their president, Joko Widodo, announced that this dusty coastal district on the island of Borneo is to be the nation’s new capital, along with its neighbor Kutai Kartanegara. The plan, as it now stands, is to abandon the much-disparaged Jakarta ( population approximately 40,000 per square mile) for the truly desolate province of East Kalimantan (population approximately 70 per square mile), starting in 2023.

Many are reasonably wondering how seriously to take the declaration; Indonesia is no stranger to improbable declarations, haphazardly carried out.

One could even argue that the nation itself is the result of one, when the man who became the country’s first president, Sukarno, was forced by zealous student revolutionaries to declare independence from Dutch colonizers, just two days after the Japanese defeat in World War II. (The second and final sentence of that declaration sums up the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants culture that has become something of a norm in Indonesian politics: “The details of the transfer of power, etc., will be worked out carefully and as soon as possible.”)