A glimmer of hope in the anti-corruption war

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

-- Lord Acton

If power tends to corrupt - and Lord Acton's adage has certainly stood the test of time - the question for Indonesia today is who is going to lead the battle against corruption?

Certainly, we cannot expect those in power to provide the leadership, if they themselves are prone to corruption.

More than three years since the nation brought the repressive regime of President Soeharto to an abrupt end in 1998, we as a nation are still grappling with the seemingly interminable problem of pervasive corruption in this country.

While every one seems to agree that corruption is at the root of the country's never-ending crisis, there is no agreement on how we should end it. We are not even sure if there is a genuine commitment from the top political leaders to uproot corruption.

For sure, there is never any shortage of slogans and buzzwords in the official war against corruption: KKN (which stands for the Indonesian words of corruption, collusion and nepotism), good governance and good government are terms and expressions frequently used in the anti-corruption campaign.

But these words have now lost their meaning and strength, while anti-corruption slogans, as in Soeharto's days, remain what they are: meaningless words.

Corruption is as pervasive today as it was four years ago.

Indonesia still ranks among the most corrupt nations in the world in a recent survey of around 90 countries by Berlin-based Transparency International.

Things have hardly changed from the Soeharto era.

In business the practice of giving bribes is still the order of the day if you to want get anything done. In dealing with government bureaucracy, fees are being charged without official receipts.

Worse still, with the government enacting new laws, rules and regulations, supposedly as part of the national reform program, business regulations have become the most lucrative commodity as businesses lobby to secure benefits to go their way.

The judiciary, supposedly the dispenser of justice and who should therefore be at the forefront of the legal battle to combat corruption, is not immune to KKN practices either. Justice in Indonesia can still be bought and sold.

Corruption during the Soeharto years was accepted, or tolerated, because many people sincerely (though perhaps erroneously) believed that it was helping to grease the wheels of the bureaucratic machine. This pretext can no longer be defended today.

On the contrary, there is an agreement that corruption was what brought Indonesia to its knees, and since the problem has not gone away, it is also the one that is keeping this country from ever lifting itself out of its current economic predicament.

The absence of any significant progress in the campaign against corruption begs the question of how deeply ingrained has corruption become in the nation's culture? Is corruption now part of our national culture as pessimists suggest, or have we become corrupt because of circumstances?

There is certainly strong grounds to be pessimistic.

Corruption has become even more widespread today than it was before. This comes with the devolution of power, which once belonged solely to Soeharto and his inner circle. Among the major beneficiaries of this greater power sharing are the legislature (both the House of Representatives and the People's Consultative Assembly), and the regional administrations through the new regional autonomy arrangements.

The legislature has certainly shown its penchant to use, or rather abuse, its newfound powers. Evidence of this was when it flexed its muscle to depose of president Abdurrahman Wahid, and subsequently to block various economic programs of the government of Abdurrahman and subsequently of President Megawati Soekarnoputri.

The regional administrations too have also shown disturbing traits of abusing their powers. In the battle for control over assets and resources, some regional administrations would not hesitate to resort to intimidations or even blackmail.

The way the West Sumatra administration foiled the planned sale of PT Semen Padang to Cemex is a case in point. While professing to act in the interests of the West Sumatra people, every body knows better that the action was taken to protect the business interests of a handful of powerful local figures.

All that we have done in these last three and a half years of so-called reforms is to disperse power, and in the process, to spread corruption. Corruption has not become less. It has not only remained pervasive, but has become more widespread.

We have replaced Soeharto, his corrupt children and cronies with new players, and a lot more of them, and most are equally corrupt.

In an ideal world, power and responsibility should go hand in hand. One is expected to exercise power responsibly. In a democracy, one way of ensuring that people in office use their power responsibly is to put in place enough checks and balances, not only to prevent abuses, but also to hold them accountable.

These democratic checks and balances are grossly absent in Indonesia today even as we decentralized power away from the hands of the president.

Is the prospect really that gloomy? Will Indonesia be forever condemned by its own corrupt practices?

There are some encouraging signs that things could get a little better, at least on some fronts.

A new anti-corruption law was enacted in December that places the burden of proof of corruption charges on the defendant. The House of Representatives is finalizing a bill on the establishment of a new commission to investigate corruption cases.

But as one panelist pointed out at The Jakarta Post discussion, the new bill defines corruption so narrowly that its effectiveness in combating corruption became questionable.

The Indonesian law defines corruption as acts that enrich state officials and cause financial losses to the state.

The battle against corruption will encounter some legal obstacles because of the narrow definition adopted by the law, the panelist said. "We should learn from other countries whose legislation aimed to weed out corrupt practices," he said.

With corrupt practices in the executive, legislative and the judiciary branches of government still rampant, it is difficult to expect any significant progress in the battle against corruption and the campaign to promote good governance and clean government.

Under the circumstances, any little progress provides us with hope, even if just a glimmer, that things will get better someday somehow.