Some identify the award as simply America’s Person of the Year, as the magazine shrugged off its own online poll and chose a less popular American (Zuckerberg) over Australian whistleblower Julian Assange, who shocked world leaders with secrets leaked — and won 20 times more votes than Zuckerberg on the official TIME website.

If we are looking for Indonesia’s Person of the Year, former tax official Gayus H. Tambunan, who reportedly possesses bank accounts and assets worth Rp 100 billion (US$11 million) — stacked in various forms from cash to posh houses to his wife’s luxurious jewelry — would definitely stand a chance.

Sometimes crisis drives significant changes and improvements, and on very rare occasions, we should thank the person who brings the crisis to us in the first place.

Scoundrels give birth to heroes, and crises pave the path toward improvement. With his acts, Gayus obliquely fingered Indonesia’s notoriously corrupt administrators by exposing the weakness of Indonesia’s law and judicial system, leaving red-faced many top government officials at the Finance Ministry, Justice and Human Rights Ministry, the National Police and even the President himself.

While The Beatles once said that money can’t buy love, in 2010 Gayus proved the opposite, as the power of his money won the hearts and minds of officials from his detention center, as well as from the immigration office that help him evade the law.

If the National Police and Justice and Human Rights Ministry officials could turn back the time, perhaps they would not choose to arrest Gayus when he fled to Singapore in March, allowing him to stay at large instead. The arrest of Gayus marked the beginning of what would lead to incriminating exposures that slapped those organizations right in their faces, in turn pushing them harder to work on reform programs that they have always so half-heartedly implemented.

For government officials whose departments are embroiled in Gayus’s play, it has been a fast-paced, intrigue-plagued drama. Had Gayus not been born in this world to become a tax office hitman playing mockery on Indonesia’s system of law, Justice and Human Rights Minister Patrialis Akbar would not be forced to make any effort to reform his severely corrupt and dilapidated departments, whose performance he frequently boasts are “successful”.

Had Gayus not bribed the prison guards and police officers in charge at his detention center (and got busted later), the hidden and long-concealed defects of law enforcement in Indonesia would not be exposed before the national and international community alike. It is now proven more clearly than ever that rich and high-profile criminals in Indonesia have always had the ability to disregard justice and buy themselves out of prison, if the price is right

Finally, had Gayus not disguised himself for outings to Bali, Macau and Kuala Lumpur in 2010, the systems at Indonesia’s prisons and immigration bureau would not have been implicated and forced to transform, as we are observing right now.

It’s true that the government’s efforts to uphold equal justice for all Indonesians are still in progress following Gayus’s case, and the outcome is still far from perfect.

But thanks to Gayus, some minor progress in Indonesia’s law enforcement is beginning to materialize. If wealthy outlaws want to use the “temporary release service” for their holidays, for example, at least they will have to pay a much higher price as detention center officials are now facing higher risks of getting caught because the public’s scrutiny of the issue is far higher than before.

To be our Person of the Year, Gayus has no reason to feel inferior to a smart, Harvard-educated person like Zuckerberg. According to inside sources at the tax office interviewed by The Jakarta Post, Gayus is indeed a genius himself and reportedly boasts an extraordinarily high IQ of 147.

While his acts look both clever and dull at the same time, and hence may not necessarily reflect his IQ, they are indeed improving this country in many aspects — both in the short-term and for the long-run
For leaking to the public truths that have long been shrouded, for forcing disgraced government officials to implement a larger scope of bureaucratic reform, and for giving the media and public entertainment to savor, Mr. Gayus Halomoan Partahanan Tambunan is an obvious choice for Indonesia’s Person of the Year 2010.


The writer is a student at the University of Indonesia’s School of Economics.

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