Repeating the old folly

The low-profile National Sports Council is now back on a high- voltage mission to raise funds for the country's sports activities. By the end of the campaign in 2008, the council expects to raise Rp 100 billion (US$7.14 million).

After bitter experiences in the same effort for many years, which were often marked by public protests, the council and the government decided last year that the best way to finance sports events and development was through involving the public.

The decision was made against the backdrop of the corruption scandal in the fund-raising campaign for the 19th Southeast Asia (SEA) Games last year. Telephone, water and electricity users, airplane passengers and car owners, who had been forced by the authorities to buy stickers in the name of fund-raising activities, were deeply dismayed by the shameful sham, which remains under police investigation.

And still fresh in the people's minds is the 1993 abolishment of the controversial SDSB government-sponsored national lottery at the hands of all sections of society in a campaign spearheaded by Moslem leaders.

The protest against SDSB, and the lottery preceding it, had dragged on for many years because the authorities had turned a deaf ear to the public's objections. The people only won the war after a change in the situation which gave Moslems more political muscle.

According to the newly introduced program, dubbed the Sports Awareness Campaign, funds will be raised through selling numbered coupons, costing Rp 5,000. The council's use of "lottery" to describe the scheme does not appear to be a slip of the tongue because the nature of the venture is just that.

The trouble is that it is not easy, at least for the council officials, to pinpoint the difference between a lottery and gambling, which is against Islamic law. In the past, including when SDSB was buried, many agreed that if some venture tempts people to try to win a huge sum by paying a little, then it is gambling. It sells but a dream, and in the past was guilty of victimizing many less educated members of society.

The Indonesian Ulemas Council appears to share the same opinion as it declared its opposition to the council's new venture on Monday. The statement may ring the death knell for the scheme before it even started. And combined with this is the testimony of several sports event organizers, who have vouched that it is almost impossible to draw 100,000 spectators a year to local sports events, even when they are free of charge.

We fully understand the council's sincerity in its effort to improve the nation's achievements in sports, still comparatively low in Asia. But the idea to raise funds through the public in the midst of the economic collapse would be taxing on already poor Indonesians.

The council apparently needs to get in touch with what the majority of people are feeling -- its fund-raising concept would be tantamount to taxing the overburdened public. Besides, our people are still haunted by the lack of transparency in the management of the council's past fund-raising activities, so infested with greedy manipulators.

There might be those who welcome the lottery because they dream of buying a Rp 26.5 billion mansion in an idyllic area of East Jakarta, but we are not supposed to repeat our ugly history. Not in a more disastrous way.