Fighting corruption through civil service reform

Riyadi Suparno, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Indonesia, the top dog in the corruption industry, has again taken out top spot in a list of Asia's most corrupt countries. This time, the rating comes from Hong-Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy.

This status as the most corrupt country in Asia has been earned, ironically, at a time when Indonesia's anti-corruption drive is in high gear, with the staging of the first corruption trial spearheaded by the newly-established Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK).

It is an irony that corruption continues unabated despite the fact that we have developed all the necessary legal means to bring white collar criminals to justice, including the establishment of the powerful KPK.

Does this mean that all our anti-corruption efforts are doomed to failure? The fact is we shall certainly fail if we persist in just pursuing corruption from the tail of the process, and not from the roots.

Indeed, South Korea's experience in fighting corruption could serve as a good example for Indonesia. Korea's various legal measures to root out corruption also resulted in failure.

Speaking at a seminar here recently, Yunwon Hwang, a professor of public administration at Seoul-based Chung-Ang University, attributed the failure to a lack of internal consciousness among civil servants -- the main perpetrators of corruption.

Therefore, on top of these legal measures, we also need to supplement our anti-corruption drives with efforts to attack corruption at its roots.

So, what exactly are the roots of corruption? Vice President Jusuf Kalla in a recent interview with The Jakarta Post clearly identified two major sources of corruption in Indonesia: an unreformed bureaucracy and opaque government procurement practices.

If indeed this is the case, then the answer to corruption should therefore be to reform the bureaucracy and the government procurement system. This article, however, shall limit itself to discussing civil service reform.

The government seems to have recognized the problem of our hopelessly corrupt bureaucracy and even identified possible causes. The government has even drawn up various laws and regulations to address the problems.

On paper, existing laws and regulations relating to the civil service are consistent with international standards. Attempts at bureaucratic reform started with a directive issued by the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) in 1998 that called for a clean civil service, free from "KKN" -- an Indonesian language acronym for corruption, collusion and nepotism. Existing laws and regulations are consistent with this MPR's directive: KKN is forbidden.

And yet, corrupt practices in the civil service persist unabated.

Clearly, the gap between laws and their implementation and enforcement remains very wide indeed. The rules are clear, but implementation and enforcement lags way behind.

Any Indonesian government would be continuously frustrated in attempting to work with a bureaucracy like this. It should be no surprise that any attempt to institute any kind of policy reform is doomed to failure, sabotaged by a conservative and self- seeking bureaucracy.

There are a few exceptions, however. One successful attempt at reform was the massive transfer of 2.1 million civil servants from the central to local governments in 2000 and 2001, which surprisingly did not cause much of a furor. This transfer was part of a massive decentralization program that was being pursued by the government of that time -- decentralization could thus probably be counted as one of the most successful reforms ever carried out.

Following the end of the transfer program in 2001, there were some 1.3 million civil servants in the center, and 2.6 million in the regions. Local civil servants accounted for some 66.7 percent of civil servants in 2001, compared to a mere 12.2 percent in 1999.

Certain local governments have themselves devised retrenchment mechanisms to rid themselves of redundant civil servants following the massive transfer. Many have also successfully restructured their bureaucratic organizations to better serve the people.

However, the government of the day did not use this momentum to further reform the civil service, or to allow local governments to go deeper in pursuing a quality civil service for their particular regions. Instead, the central government took back the rights to control civil servants and implemented a unified national career civil service.

Now long overdue, the new government has taken an initiative to replace most of the 700 existing top echelon bureaucrats over the next three years.

Vice President Jusuf Kalla explained that one of the main reasons for replacing them was because they did not perform.

The move, disregarding any political motives, is actually laudable. The problem is that it stands alone, and is not part of a wider, more wide-ranging reform package for the civil service.

Another drawback of this move is that the new positions would only be open for civil servants, who are not among the best candidates for the positions.

If the government is serious about improving the civil service, then it should consider opening up the field, giving way for the best talent outside the bureaucracy to compete for top echelon positions.

If necessary, the government should use this opportunity to launch other reforms by opening up all higher echelon positions to outside competition. This way, the government could set performance targets for new officials. And this could then become an initial step towards implementing systems of performance management in the civil service, which has been implemented successfully in many Commonwealth countries such as Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.

If performance management is too hard to implement in Indonesia, then the government should devise other reform plans that will not fail in the implementation stage. Whatever the plan, it must attack the systemic corruption of the bureaucracy.

Whatever reforms are made, the government must empower the clients of the civil service -- the people -- through more transparency.

To this end, the government and the House of Representatives must give priority to deliberating a freedom of information bill. Freedom of information -- if passed into law -- would initiate a process of transparency that would subject the civil service to much closer scrutiny by the people.