Giving credit where it's due

Giving credit where it's due

From Kompas

In a report Asked to step down because of criminal charges (Kompas, June 8), President Abdurrahman Wahid said, as Bank Indonesia Governor Syahril Sabirin has said, that director of Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI) Prijadi was the one who thought up of the idea of people's credits and loans to low-income people. He also said that it was Prijadi who developed BRI's small-scale loans and that without him BRI was certain to collapse.

I began my career at BRI and have always thought that I was "raised" there. Therefore I have my own experience about how the rural loans, mostly for farmers and small-scale traders, came to be devised as a concept and how this concept was later put into practice and developed and modified in the 1970s and early 1980s by the late Mr. Sugianto (then BRI director).

I am definitely certain about this matter and would like to say that the President's statement, as quoted earlier, is neither correct nor accurate, whosoever whispered it to him. He should have checked this matter with former BRI figures who are still alive, such as the former president director preceding the present chairman of the bank and assistants to the late Mr. Sugianto.

Or, better still, as expected of someone with the high integrity that befits an official of a state-owned enterprise, Prijadi himself should have the moral courage to straighten out the President's incorrect statement.

SRI REDJEKI DWIANTO

Depok, West Java