Saldi and his expectations of Susilo

Saldi and his expectations of Susilo

Syofiardi Bachyul Jb, Contributor/Padang

Corruption is rife in Indonesia and its eradication is highly
dependent upon the country's president.

Throughout the administration of President Megawati
Soekarnoputri, only the regions seemed to be serious about
eliminating corruption.

In West Sumatra province 43 members of the provincial
legislative assembly have been convicted of graft. It is public
knowledge, however, that more corruption can be found in the
corridors of power in Jakarta.

"If the president is actively encouraging the eradication of
corruption, hopefully the drive to eradicate it in Indonesia will
be more intensive than before. In a patriarchal society, the
leaders must provide a good example," Forum of Concern for West
Sumatra (FPSB) coordinator Saldi Isra said.

Saldi, also a lecturer at the School of Law at Andalas
University, Padang, has this year been named a joint recipient of
Bung Hatta Anti-Corruption Award. The other recipient is Solok
Regent Gamawan Fauzi. The two will receive the award at Jakarta
Convention Center on Tuesday night.

Comparing Megawati, the incumbent president, and Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono, who is almost certain to succeed Megawati as
Indonesia's first directly elected president, Saldi said Susilo
had shown a clearer commitment than Megawati to eradicating
corruption.

"In his campaign for the presidential runoff, he openly said
that he would lead the drive to eradicate corruption," he said.

To translate this commitment into reality, Susilo must appoint
cabinet ministers, particularly those dealing with the law, who
were strongly committed to eradicating corruption and not
implicated in any graft, Saldi said.

The positions of the attorney general and the chief of the
national police should go to capable and credible people only, he
said.

"It is impossible to speedily eradicate corruption if the key
people in the cabinet lineup are embroiled in one way or another
in corruption," he said.

Susilo should then show both his cabinet and the public that
he leads a modest life. He and his family should not be engaged
in business dealings during his presidential tenure and should
declare their wealth to the public.

"If he can do these two things, Susilo will have quite a big
asset with which to start realizing his commitment to eradicate
corruption," Saldi said.

Aside from internal affairs, Susilo must be able in the first
100 days of his administration to encourage the reopening of
high-profile, major corruption cases that had yet to be
thoroughly settled.

Cases that have attracted great public attention include,
among others, alleged corruption in national banking circles, the
bribery of House members from 1999 to this year and the Bank
Indonesia Liquidation Support Loan (BLBI) scheme.

He should also restart Soeharto's trial although it would be
impossible to settle this case in his first one hundred days as
president, Saldi said.

Then, Susilo must encourage quicker investigation into graft
cases in the regions and identify the reasons why corruption
eradication had been going on at a snail's pace.

"The new president should also scrap the practice of
necessitating consent from the president or the home minister for
an investigation into corruption case that involves a government
official.

"The president should authorize prosecutor's offices to
investigate government officials without having to wait for his
consent," he said.

It was also important for the president to find ways to ensure
graft suspects would not hide behind the excuse of being sick to
avoid being investigated, as former president Soeharto and
chairman of the Confederation of Primary Cooperatives Association
(INKUD) Nurdin Halid had done.

If Susilo took all these steps and strongly encouraged their
implementation, the eradication of corruption would become a
reality, not only at the bottom but also at the top, he said.

"What is happening now is that the drive to eradicate
corruption has begun at the lowest levels, for example, the
exposure of graft cases involving members of a regional
legislative assembly.

"If a similar drive also began at the top, at some point these
two drives would meet and this would mean the eradication of
corruption from top to bottom. In such a way, there would be no
discrimination in the investigation into graft cases," he said.

It was quite promising, he said, to hear Susilo strongly
repeat he would accept all the Partnership for Reform's proposed
20 programs of acceleration for good governance, which his
administration would institute in the first 100 days.

If the government followed up on this, it could sign an
integrity pact on the implementation of good governance and clean
government, in the future.

"Solok Regency, under its regent, Gamawan Fauzi, has signed
the pact at the regental level, so why can't the central
government do likewise at the national level? We need a strong
leader who can make this commitment and if the new president is
ready for this, it will send a strong signal to lower levels,"
said Saldi, who is a father of two daughters.

An obstacle that might stand in Susilo's way, Saldi said, was
his military background. It is generally perceived that business
networks in the military circles are fraught with corruption,
collusion and nepotism. To change this practice poses a great
challenge to Susilo.

"The victory of SBY (Susilo) and his running mate, Jusuf
Kalla, in the presidential runoff indicates that the public are
pinning great hopes on them for a change.

"People did not want to see Megawati reelected as president
because she failed to eradicate corruption. If Susilo fails to
follow up on this hope, he will simply be repeating the mistakes
of his predecessors," he said.

Saldi Isra was born in Paninggahan, Solok, West Sumatra, on
August 20, 1968. After earning his Master of Public
Administration degree from the Institute of Postgraduate Studies
and Research, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in
2001, he returned to his former university to teach in the
department of constitutional law and in the postgraduate law
program.

Married to Leslie Annisaa Taufik, since 1995 Taufik has been a
prolific writer of opinion pieces on matters related to
constitutional law in national newspapers.

During the past three months, four to eight of his articles
have been published each month. Mostly about graft eradication,
the panel of judges took them into account when naming him as one
of the joint recipients of the Bung Hatta Anticorruption Award.

Driven by Saldi the FPSB successfully investigated and exposed
a corruption case involving Rp 6.4 billion in state funds in the
West Sumatra 2002 provincial budget, an act leading to the
conviction of 43 members of the provincial legislative assembly.

"Although I am formally receiving the award, I'm considering
it a citation for FPSB, a forum where we all work together. On
the one hand, we are happy for the appreciation given to our hard
work in the FPSB, but on the other, we deem it a great challenge
to maintain our level of achievement," he said.

Following the revelation of the graft case in West Sumatra, he
said, the province had often been associated with widespread
corruption.

However, now that two people from the province have been named
recipients of the Bung Hatta award, it is obvious a serious drive
to eradicate corruption has also begun.