I

would like to comment on a news report “Bali touted as anticorruption icon” (The Jakarta Post, Jan. 12) on the Bali page.

Bali is one of the most corrupt places in Indonesia! With so much foreign money, and just so much money flowing here, corruptors are having a picnic, it’s a cakewalk, and they are picnicking and cakewalking all over the place.

It’s so endemic in Bali at every level, even down to the banjars (neighborhood units), schools, and families.
This is not a corruption bright spot. It is a corruption black hole. But I certainly salute the “ambition” to work toward eradicating corruption.

Being perfectly objective, I would say that within 20 years, corruption could be reduced by perhaps 50 percent, but it’s not easy to know how to quantify or count corruption.

I feel quite certain that anybody tasked with evaluating corruption in Bali and quantifying it and then determining whether Bali has “succeeded” in reducing corruption, would himself be eaten up with corruption. So really, what’s the point of putting forth the notion of Bali as a possible “anticorruption icon”. It’s patently ridiculous.

In Bali, corruption is rife to the point of being ubiquitous — in the schools, the universities, healthcare, public welfare, sanitation, community governance, village governance, municipal governance, regental governance, provincial governance, public works contracting, private works contracting, prisons, the electrical service, the telephone service, the public water supply, agricultural associations, regulatory bodies, markets, banks, community savings and loan associations, transportation, law enforcement, courts of law, the media, NGOs, and within every business that operates in Bali with more than one person operating it.

Bali is so corrupt that it’s considered normal here for people to skim money off their own family members.
Not “bad” just “normal”. It’s expected. I’m not bitter; I’m just practical, objective and realistic about avoiding setting goals that are absurd.

Like with substance addiction, the addict cannot begin to recover until they have admitted their addiction
and their helplessness in overcoming it. I say, for Bali, it would be best to start there. Within a few years, it may be possible, with great effort, to acknowledge the problem and recognize the extent and strength of its grip.

Then and only then can Bali even begin to incrementally address the horrible plague of corruption that has so sickened this society and begin to reduce its grip. Let’s just get real.


Susi Johnson
Seminyak, Bali