Accountability ill spot in corruption fight

Accountability ill spot in corruption fight

Moch. N. Kurniawan, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Indonesia is strengthening its accountability framework, but the
effort is having little impact on the fight against widespread
corruption, as evident by the fact that only a few corruptors are
being held responsible for their crimes, the World Bank said in
its report issued on Monday.

"This is because the informal rules, mainly inherited from the
Soeharto regime, still prevail, as do many of the practices,
while the new formal rules have yet to be implemented
effectively," the World Bank said in its report titled "Combating
Corruption in Indonesia, enhancing accountability for
development".

The 32-year Soeharto regime, which fell in 1998, was
profoundly marked with massive incidences of corruption,
allegedly carried out by his family and cronies.

The report was published by the World Bank team led by Sarwar
Lateef, the bank's Governance Specialist for Poverty Reduction
and Economic Management Network.

In its latest report, the Transparency International
maintained Indonesia as among the most corrupt countries in the
world.

Lateef, along with the bank's Country Director in Indonesia,
Andrew Steer, and the executive director of the Partnership for
the Governance Reform (Kemitraan) nongovernmental organization,
H.S. Dillon, briefed the media on the report on Monday.

The report stated the present agencies in charge of enforcing
the new rules were weak, poorly funded, ill-equipped and riddled
with corruption.

Politicians or policy makers in Indonesia's young democracy
for the most part lack formal experience and are learning on the
job, it said.

Decentralization has almost overnight created a new class of
politicians and policy makers in Indonesia's 400 districts, but
many of them and their agents, the civil servants and those
entrusted with upholding the law, remain very much a product of
Soeharto's regime, it said.

"Thus, they are used to fundamentally undermining
accountability," the report said.

Without an authoritarian figure to control their excesses,
they are free to pursue rent seeking unchecked, it further said.

"With billion of dollars of state assets still to redistribute
in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the temptation for new
and old economic elite to seek to shape the rules of the game to
their own advantage is extraordinarily difficult to check," it
said.

The media and civil society had also offered a tough
opposition to corruption, but their effectiveness was limited,
not least by the need to enhance their own accountability, the
report said.

Despite the weak impact of accountability against corruption,
the bank admitted the accountability framework was being
strengthened.

This included the creation of direct presidential elections,
the scrapping of the seats for military/police in the House of
Representatives, decentralization that brings the government
closer to the people and the planned establishment of the Anti-
Corruption Commission, the report stated.

In order to continue the reform, the report offered a two-
track approach to deal with corruption: strengthening the demand
for reforms at a local level, and the central government's core
program of reforms.

It said the bank's experience had shown how local communities
could be empowered to monitor village development and "serve as
an effective internal check against the misuse of development
funds."

At the central level, the bank said "the high cost and weak
regulation of campaign finance will continue to drive corruption"
unless urgently addressed".

It called for partial budgetary funding for campaign finance,
free broadcasting slots for parties and a ban on the use of state
resources for political purposes.

The central bank, General Elections Commission, Supreme Audit
Agency and Supreme Court "need to be greatly strengthened" and
institutions providing public services should be fully funded
from the budget.