No playoff, no public services

Tb. Arie Rukmantara, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

For over 30 years, Wati has never enjoyed "free" public services. Each time she renews her ID card, her driver's license, or applied for marriage and land certificates, as well as birth certificates for her three sons, she always is forced to pay hundreds of thousands of rupiah in bribes to obtain her documents.

"If I do not pay, it would be time consuming to get those certificates. Moreover, they would have bounced me around from desk to desk like a ping pong ball," said the 55-year-old woman.

She was lucky that she could afford the illegal fees required, thanks to her wealthy husband, whom she admitted also might have taken payoffs while he served as a civil servant.

"My husband is a retired official with the tax office, he might have taken some bribes during his working days. I guess, I have used bribery money to bribe others. People call that karma," she said with smile.

Wati can call it whatever she wants, but Joe Fernandes of the Institute for Public Policy Studies (IPCOS) says the government current situation was akin to a "corporate state", in which officials seek maximum benefits from the public services they give.

"Indonesia is not a 'welfare state', where the government serves its citizens without charging them, because it is their right to have good and free public services," he explained during a year-end discussion on Thursday to assess the country's public services in 2005.

Joe lashed out at the government for doing nothing to curb the "crass selling of public services", and asserted that state officials had even maintained such corrupt practices for their own benefit.

"I doubt whether next year the condition will change," despite the implementation of the regional autonomy law, he said.

The recent release of the 2005 Global Corruption Barometer, a report issued by Transparency International, was similar to Joe's assessment. The report shows that up to 30 percent of Indonesian adults may have bribed officials in 2005 for government services to be done in a timely fashion.

A senior official from the office of the state minister for administrative reforms, Mangapul Sitorus, admitted that such bribery had remained out of control for the past three decades.

He blamed all of this on poor professionalism and lack of specialization in their field as civil servants working at public service agencies.

"To curb the problem, our office has come up with a reward and punishment mechanism, performance appraisals, as well as setting the minimum standards of public services," Mangapul pledged during the discussion hosted by IPCOS.

He said that if passed into law, the bill on public services, currently being deliberated at the House of Representatives, was expected to effectively force civil servants to serve the public better or at least in accordance with the minimum standards.

House member Ferry Mursyidan Baldan suggested that the government speed up the introduction of the policy of establishing a single identity number to prevent citizens from dealing with the same procedures and requirements over and over each time they apply for new documents.

"The House of Representatives will approve the policy despite a huge amount of money needed from the state budget to set up the information and technology infrastructure for this purpose," he said.