Repeating the old folly

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.