I

t seems that national politics gets more muddled every day. The media is filled with depressing news, from corruption, malfunctioning bureaucracy to communal violence.

Six Indonesian students won medals in a recent math Olympics in Amsterdam and a young woman won an honor at this year’s Miss Deaf World contest in Prague are the few things that have uplifted our spirits as political elites were busy trying to save their skins.

The other good news is that our leaders have been honing their theatrical skills instead of trying to silence their critics with guns as rulers in other parts of the world have been doing.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhyono, who has been slammed as a weak leader, has revealed his interest in taking up a new profession as a futurologist once his term in office ends in 2014 and probably giving up his glorious political career.

“Someday, when I retire from the presidency, I may join your exciting field and may even form a club of futurology,” he said when addressing a gathering of world futurologists in Jakarta on Wednesday. Yudhoyono’s idea could raise eyebrows in Indonesia where a futurology is easily confused with fortune-telling mysticism still widely practiced in this age of high technology.

Then on Friday, House Speaker Marzuki Alie — from Yudhoyono’s ruling Democratic Party — whose ideas have often draw fierce criticism, set the world on fire by proposing that the much celebrated Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) be disbanded and that embezzlers of state money be pardoned if they gave back their loot.

He reasoned that none of the candidates vying for a leadership post at the KPK were qualified enough to lead the “independent” body while people increasingly lose their trust in the corrupt conventional judiciary and police.

Marzuki said he was tired of the KPK, which has sent dozens of corrupt lawmakes to prison, after graft fugitive Democratic Party colleague Muhammad Nazaruddin accused incumbent KPK leaders of taking bribes “just like other robbers”.

Well, let’s hope Marzuki was only being facetious as he was tired of desperately defending more of his fellow lawmakers who face graft allegations.

How can the chief representative of the people entertain such a wild idea as killing off the antigraft body when Indonesia remains one of the most corrupt countries on the planet?

I wonder if Marzuki will also insist that the Yudhoyono administration be disbanded too because critics have accused it of leading Indonesia into becoming a failed state.

Then he will hopefully propose that the House be dissolved too because it is perceived as the most corrupt institution and nobody trusts it anymore. Or, it would be more appropriate if he also seeks to dissolve the Democratic Party because its politicians are implicated in graft cases.

The hunt for Nazaruddin, who reportedly fled to Singapore on May 23, just a day before he was named a suspect in a Rp 191 billion (US$22.46 million) Southeast Asian Games construction project in South Sumatra, has made a laughing stock of the Democratic Party for three months.

It seems that the former Democratic Party treasurer has so far outwitted police and the KPK because he enjoys the protection of powerful figures who don’t want to see him unveil a great conspiracy from his hiding place.

How can he elude the police and KPK — and even Interpol — in such a spectacular way yet still grant television and telephone interviews to the media in Indonesia to attack the KPK and Democratic Party leaders without authorities being able to locate his position with their state of the art technology?

If this whole affair had happened in Japan or South Korea, where the culture of shame is serious, the police and KPK chiefs could have committed suicide!

I am one of those convinced that a bread jingle heard in the middle of his interview with MetroTV the other day suggests that Nazaruddin is in fact in hiding somewhere in Indonesia.

There is no good reason to believe Nazaruddin’s claim that the unmistakeable song was his mobile ring tone unless he was the owner of the venture. Or do you buy it?

The police sleuths should follow bread vendors in major cities who play the recorded jingle as they pedal along. Who knows, luck may be on their side and they may bump into Nazaruddin.

— Pandaya