On public service
On public service
Five thousand rupiahs may not sound like much, but the newspaper reports that people will soon have to pay close to that to have their identity papers made is certainly bad news to many -- and for more than one reason.
To summarize: Under an agreement which was signed in March by the Minister of Home Affairs, Moch. Yogie S., and the chief director of the private company PT Solusindo Mitra Sejati, the government will be using that firm's services to put together and implement a system of mass registration for the purpose of managing population data. The cooperation is to last for a minimum of six years and a maximum of 10.
Under the terms of the agreement, the Ministry of Home Affairs will instruct local administrators in the provinces and regencies to prepare the means, or "infrastructure", needed by the company to put together the system. For its part, the firm will submit plans and all other relevant material to the ministry. All expenses incurred for the job will be paid by the company. For Jakarta, the plan is reportedly to come into effect at the beginning of next year. It is presumably to compensate for all these expenses that the cost of having an ID card made will be raised from the current Rp 1,000 to Rp 4,900.
To get back to the objections that have been and are being raised to all this: For many, if not most Indonesians, Rp 4,900 is quite a considerable amount of money to pay just for having one's ID card made. It may be noted that in actual practice people already have to pay a lot more than the officially required amount of money due to various "donations". The question is, who can guarantee that with the new system coming into effect, the same practice of seeking and accepting bribes will stop. In fact, many people fear that it could even become worse.
The second objection is that apparently, once again, the authorities are going ahead with a plan without heeding the many protests against it. The past few months have heard more than a few public outcries over the plan. The Governor of Jakarta, Surjadi Soedirdja, was even reported to have assured people that the Indonesian capital city would not need to cooperate with the private sector because the Jakarta administration already owned adequately sophisticated equipment for the purpose. Now it is reported that Jakarta will begin working together with PT Solusindo Mitra Sejati as of the beginning of next year, which is only about a week away.
As is usual in cases such as this, talk of collusion between government officials and private business has again become rife in the wake of the reports. A former Ministry of Home Affairs official, for example, is reported to have questioned not only the cost involved for the public, but also the plan's very legality. At present, many Indonesians are well educated enough to believe in the dictum that the state bureaucracy is there to serve the needs of the public.
We are afraid that if schemes of "cooperation" such as this become the vogue, people will eventually come to the belief that rather than to serve the public, the bureaucracy is there to function increasingly as an instrument through which unprincipled people, inside the government administration or out, can enrich themselves. Perhaps in this case, though, there are some other factors at work that make such a deal necessary, or expedient. If so, we hope the authorities will come out with some tenable explanation.