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.