Cursory readings of the public mood since the “gecko versus crocodile” episode reveal a constant factor: support for our national heroes, in the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK). The faces of these heroes are the once-embattled KPK deputies, Chandra M. Hamzah and Bibit S. Rianto.
The KPK chairman is now in jail for murder, and Bibit has been recently upset over reports that his son was involved in the very type of deed the antigraft movement is supposed to wipe out — judicial corruption.
However, people know who and what they are supporting – not exactly the personnel, but the institution of the KPK itself. Its leaders, if found to be tainted, can go. But the KPK remains the body on which many of the hopes for “reformasi” must rest — so that here and now, despite human imperfections, we have our own independent body that can chip away, challenge, bug and bag corruptors.
But this time there’s something our elected representatives have evidently failed to see clearly. Last week lawmakers even went so far as to threaten to cut the budget allocation for the KPK if they deemed it to have performed badly — just as more and more reports were being churned out alleging that their former colleagues were implicated in corruption.
However lawmakers, feeling they had dug up so much in their inquiry, conducted almost completely in the public spotlight, said the KPK was dragging its feet on its investigations into the Bank Century bailout.
In the earlier sorry spectacle of the “gecko versus the crocodile” episode — (the KPK deputies versus the self-claimed crocodile — a police officer) we had to witness the appalling attack of lawmakers on the KPK.
This was not surprisingly really since their predecessors had already sought to curtail the KPK’s powers, after they found legislators increasingly making up the bulk of those being investigated and arrested for graft.
Then, after their supposedly heroic inquiry into the flows of funds from the US$716 million bailout, the lawmakers’ show was apparently over. Their overwhelming verdict that the government was wrong to use public money to bail out the bank was politically conclusive for them.
Now the public is willing to wait as the investigation works its way through the legal system, this time via the KPK.
“Our methods are different,” said a KPK officer, responding to the lawmakers’ impatient demands to see results. The data from the inquiry from parliament was useful for “additional information,” he said, to the annoyance of legislators.
But legislators may not have sensed how relieved the public were that their show was over, an embarrassing display of attention-grabbing politicians, jabbing and sniping in every possible way and essentially holding up the second-term administration of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
Citizens have crticized their President, moaning every now and then, as if he had been grossly lacking in self confidence after having been elected directly for the second time, although its the first time this has happened in this country.
Voters also knew they had elected a largely inexperienced body of parliamentarians. But thanks to the House inquiry in the full public view people now knew they (the parliamentarians) were far worse than many had expected, as far as basic decency was concerned.
Everyone is learning about this democracy that we have had thrust upon us, after decades of not needing to think for ourselves. We know now that things don’t turn out right over-night, and that among us we do have some good people doing their part in what needs to be done. House members are expected to learn such wisdom, instead of simply hounding-down the anticorruption body which continues to reveal more of the rot among their own, past and present.
