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.