What's the motive of corruption?

The way I see it, your article Corruption as role distortion by Ignas Kleden (The Jakarta Post, Jan. 6, 2001) somehow mitigates corruption and put the blame on role performance rather than on the individual himself. The corruptor is a person who is led into temptation, and, as Oscar Wilde says, the best way to overcome temptation is to yield to it.

As an Indonesian citizen I have "seen" corruption under four governments (Sukarno's, Soeharto's, Habibie's and the present regime's). As a layman in the matter of corruption from a sociological point of view, I can only see that it all boils down to two causes, the need to make ends meet and greed. Lower-level government employees turn to corruption because their salary is not sufficient to maintain them through the whole month. This may be understandable, but when one comes to greed, this is something innate.

Can one understand why a high-level government functionary corrupts hundreds of millions, or even billions of rupiah? Why can't he or she be satisfied with just some tens of millions of rupiah? This mental attitude is very hard to eradicate. It cannot be solved by denying the middleman role of government employees, because the whole corrupt generation has to die out and be replaced with new people (who hopefully have not inherited or who have not been contaminated by corruption) to lead the country.

RUDI WILSON

Bandung