Time to Address Corruption at Party Level in Indonesia

Time to Address Corruption at Party Level

By Pitan Daslani on 9:49 am December 24, 2013.
The biggest news that came out of Jakarta recently was not the detention of Banten Governor Ratu Atut Chosiyah in a bribery scandal that removed Akil Mochtar from the top position of Indonesia’s highest court. Such detentions are so common that they no longer make the news.The biggest news, instead, is that Atut was the 311th head of regional government to have spoiled Indonesia’s democracy with her corrupt way of life and been brought to justice.

She is the tangible result of a boisterously idolized direct election system that unfortunately lacks substance and quality but who is still being retained by a national government lacking in both vision and direction.

Find — if you can — another country on earth where 311 of its 533 heads of provincial, district and municipal-level governments are so corrupt and yet they behave as if nothing had gone wrong. The Guinness Book of World Records should register this as the world’s largest democratic cataclysm.

But first of all, one must ask a very fundamental question: Does the capture and detention of so many government leaders indicate a success in battling corruption, or does it actually indicate a failure in finding the right people to become governors, mayors and district heads? Or both?

More than 15 years away from the starting line of its reform, Indonesia has come to realize that it has actually been healing its wounds by creating more wounds and refusing to find a better therapy.

The main reason why reformists united to topple Suharto in May 1998 was that he was perceived to be so corrupt that the government he led had to be overturned and replaced by supposedly—or self-acclaimed—“clean” people.

But here are the results: During 32 years of Suharto era, the government was centralized and corruption was therefore centered in the capital city; so only officials in Jakarta had a chance to become corrupt.

After January 2001, when the central government implemented a regional autonomy policy that effectively decentralized power to the regions (now already 34 provinces and 499 districts and cities), state power was redistributed to those many regions, but with it also went the “opportunity to become corrupt” — simply because decentralization meant every district head and mayor was the boss of his or her region with full authority to manage allocations from the state budget.

Today, out of the approximately Rp 1,500 trillion ($123 billion) state budget, around Rp 500 trillion, or more than 30 percent, is disbursed to the regions each year, triggering imaginations on how to embezzle it. If the money were not there, none of the governors, district heads or mayors would have been dumped in jail.

During the Suharto era — even when the state budget was still centralized—at least 30 percent of it went missing each year, according to the doyen of Indonesian economists, the late Professor Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, and was never accounted for to date. During that 31-year era, there was only one “center of corruption,” which was the seat of the government in Jakarta.

Today the nation has created 508 new centers of corruption because full autonomy in the hands of the regional leaders expedites the implementation of the theory of John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The Corruption Eradication Commission, known as the KPK, can only deal with corruption as an act of crime. It cannot, however, deal with corruption as a culture of governance and a new way of life upheld by the society of a nation-in-a-hurry that prefers to outsmart its own laws and rules wherever possible. So much that a contemporary adage says, “laws are made in order to be broken.”

The KPK has no power to cleanse a bureaucracy that preserves so many loopholes and untenable gray areas. The antigraft agency can only deal with transgressions of law but not intentions, maneuvers, and hidden transactions beyond its radar.

Amid the democratic debacle, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, the deputy governor of Jakarta, announced recently that as of 2014, the special territory of Jakarta would implement a non-cash budget disbursement system where all payments shall be done electronically by software.

This should be implemented nationwide because it would prevent officials from ever having any more opportunity to embezzle state funds. E-budgeting, as they call it, would also be good for thorough supervision of procurements and payments because through well-designed accounting software, how a state budget is used can be monitored in real time.

But even if this experiment can trim opportunities for embezzlement, a bigger question has not been answered: How to upgrade the quality and integrity of political party members, so that only those with leadership capability, managerial skills and proven integrity are appointed regional leaders.

The real responsibility is actually on the shoulders of political parties which are the “factories” of politicians that would occupy all those strategic positions.

Indonesia’s political parties still rely on patronage instead of a leadership member-forming system and public perception — which can be engineered — instead of capacity and quality of their members.

Even in facing elections, they sell not smart ideas and concepts to their constituencies, but the popularity of whoever they can find as the main draw. These would include politically inexperienced musicians, soap opera stars, clowns and even paranormal practitioners and magicians.

To eradicate corruption in Indonesia’s many regions, the battle must be fought in two directions at the same time: remove the culture of corruption instead of only the acts of corruption, and groom clean politicians to lead the country.

No clean water will ever come from a dirty spring. If political parties are not clean, none of their members will ever be. Don’t ever dream of having a clean government when the sources of its leadership positions — the political parties — are not respectable and worthy of appreciation.

So, the biggest task of this nation is not just to deal with the corrupt, but to deal with political parties, which means there must be a law that sanctions political parties against having members with corrupt behavior. Only then would the parties be compelled to conduct integrity education for their respective politicians.

But who shall pioneer such an endeavor? None of the 12 national parties that will contest the elections next year has any of these ideas on their agenda. They are simply busy with image-building exercises in an otiose attempt to fool an increasingly educated and politically conscious society.

Pitan Daslani is a senior political correspondent and director of Jakarta-based Managing the Nation Institute. He can be reached at pitandaslani@gmail.com.