Reforming bureaucracy is a Herculean task

Harry Bhaskara ,  Jakarta   |  Wed, 05/28/2008 12:56 PM  |  Opinion

Ministers, particularly those from political parties, would replace their first rank echelon personnel on the day they start office.

Picture this. You are a director of a business and you have five managers working under you. Each of them has an income six-times your salary. Can you live with the absurdity?

Yes, you can. And it is happening in government ministries. The minister receives Rp 30 million a month but his five director generals take home Rp 150 million to Rp 200 million each every month.

The director generals once proposed to give part of their monthly income to the minister but the minister was furious and their offer was not taken up.

The minister is determined to reform the bureaucracy and she will not budge an inch. The director generals' incomes are derived from corruption, a practice carried over from the Soeharto administration.

This episode shows how difficult it is to root out corruption, even in the hands of a steely minister. Old political culture sticks.

Single fighter ministers, assuming there are more than one, need public support to succeed.

This agonizing story surfaced in a conference commemorating the ten-year anniversary of the 1998 reformation, organized by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences in Jakarta last week.

Certainly, there has been encouraging development in the last ten years such as freedom of expression and an improved political life, but the following sad stories are easy to spot.

The 1999 regional autonomy law has given more power to the regions, a radical departure from 32 years of the centralized system under Soeharto. This change has not come without excessive corruption.

Once implemented, regents raise their own salaries, often to absurd levels, by signing their own decrees. Their salaries are paid by Jakarta.

Regional administrations in all 33 provinces have issued hundreds of local regulations later nullified by Jakarta, as many of them went against the Constitution.

Some reasons behind the mess are the lack of skills and human resources in many regions.

Old practices in the bureaucracy are hard to change. Ministers, particularly those from political parties, would replace their first rank echelon personnel on the day they start office.

This is reminiscent of Soeharto's days when Golkar ministers would replace all first echelon personnel down to the lowest rank with Golkar members.

During Sukarno's days, a governor once replaced virtually all his personnel with those bearing his family name.

To paraphrase Dr. Miftah Thoha, one of the speakers in the two-day conference, there has been no grand design to reform bureaucracy in the last ten years.

An expert on public administration from University of Gadjah Mada said because bureaucracy had become more prevalent, corruption had become more pervasive.

Interestingly, judicial and legal institutions, including public prosecutors, top the corruption list.

Unlike Sukarno (1945-1967) and Soeharto (1967-2008), who Thoha said had clear concepts of their bureaucracy, the four presidents in the last ten years, including Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, have not.

Sukarno assigned former prime minister Juanda Kartawidjaja to design his bureaucracy, modeled on the American system, which was more pragmatic than the Dutch system.

Soeharto, in turn, asked Awaloedin Jamin, then a young police officer who had just been picked to head the Manpower Ministry, to reform Sukarno's bureaucracy. Awaloedin happened to be the son-in-law of Juanda.

Thoha also criticized a series of political laws to strengthen democracy as it only yielded a "democratic deficit".

The laws included those on political parties, elections and the structure and position of the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) and the Regional House of Representatives.

The Constitution, a sacred cow until 1998, has gone through four amendments, but the process was a mess, said Denny Indrayana, also from Gadjah Mada University.

Public participation was extremely low with only 150 letters received in a country with 230 million people, compared to two million letters in South Africa, with a population of 45 million people.

With a presidential election only a year away, dozens of political parties have sprouted up. They are often not interested in excelling their rivals in promoting the best political agenda or yielding the best politicians with the best ideologies.

Like business firms, many of these political parties will start "auctioning" to the highest bidder once they are eligible to compete in the election.

Ours democracy goes hand in hand with our resource-based economy. The question that will perhaps preoccupy an election victor, from regents to presidents, is how much money they have to make once they are in office to pay back their financiers.

The author is a staff writer at The Jakarta Post.

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