Insight: Public office: A matter of commitment, not employment

New start?: President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (fourth left) makes a statement about the Cabinet reshuffle from his home in Cikeas in Bogor, West Java, as Vice President Boediono (fifth left) and Yudhoyono's coalition partners look on. If the last Cabinet reshuffle is the solution, what was the problem? Pose this question to pundits and they will give us conflicting answers. We may also directly ask the President and he would give us public statements categorically different from the real reason that compelled him to reshuffle his Cabinet. Since the real reason remains as concealed as the President’s judgment, we have the liberty to curl this question slightly: Will the reshuffle improve the conduct of government?

The answer seems to be no. The reason has less to do with personal intrigue surrounding the President’s captive relationship with the coalition parties than with the misconduct of political power in public offices that has been with us for some time. It is true that being captive to the coalition’s power-wrangling has reinforced the deteriorating quality of Yudhoyono’s presidency. But this is only a symptom of a much deeper problem afflicting public office.

Let us start by looking at the problem of who monitors the monitor. This is a problem of checks-and-balances that makes democracy appear so luminous as a form of government. But the checks-and-balances mechanism also has limits, in that it is perpetually haunted by the question we can ask ad infinitum: Who oversees the overseers? The current democratization process in Indonesia is bogged down by a spiraling quest for an overseer capable of ensuring the accountability of those who exercise power.

Unlike under the New Order regime, we now have an independent House of Representatives. But who oversees what is now widely recognized as a rotten House? An independent anticorruption body (the KPK) is doing its best, but who oversees its misconduct? The list can be extended further, and it all leads to an increasing number of special taskforces and overseeing bodies being set up within the convoluted labyrinth of state institutions. All branches of public office are now bloated with multiplying niches.

Not all niches are created as overseeing bodies, as many are set up with the purpose of ensuring task performance. This is what seems to have been the case with many newly appointed deputy ministers in the recent reshuffle. Their tasks may be different from that of overseers, but the logic behind their appointment is the same. It is a form of despair over the endemic failure of power exercise in public office. It is true that the corrupt tendency of power means that those who wield it are in constant need of oversight. But power that is accountable only under scrutiny is no different to political infantilism.

The above point brings us to the next problem that no Cabinet reshuffle will resolve: the infantilism in the wielding of power by our public officials. This symptom has been with us for some time and crops up every time there is Cabinet reshuffle. Under these circumstances it is not hard to find certain
figures behaving like children who have just found new toys upon their appointment as ministers or deputy ministers. It is not the elation at political appointment that is an issue. To say that the bliss is driven by a sense of public service is too lofty to be real, for the actual delight concerns personal achievement and public hype.

Rather, the issue concerns the individual attitudes toward power and authority that goes with public office. It is a sense that one is sitting on top of an institutional realm, with so much power instead of responsibility, with a sense of commanding instead of leadership, with so much discretionary convenience rather than public commitment. It is from this political infantilism that when many of these office holders talk of power they merely mean the pleasure that they get from purely personal exercises of will, which is basically parasitical to public life.

This is what has made politics and public office appear so ugly in the public eye.

Coupled with the sectional interests from the political parties they represent, public office in turn becomes both a party and personal fiefdom for rent-seeking. Current cases upon cases of graft in many state departments originate precisely from this political infantilism. Once all this is set in motion, no Cabinet reshuffle however well-intended it is will bring about any improvement. Nor will the creation of new portfolios of deputy ministers make the art of governance any better.

In the end, we cannot substitute commitment with any recipes taken from modern management. And here lies an irony that characterizes the success of public office. While a public officeholder should know how to exercise power, one is most likely to succeed if, and only if, he/she is blessed with a properly indifferent attitude toward power. It is because only through this guarded indifference that one can behold public office as a matter of commitment rather than employment or a personal exercise of will.

Indeed, the secret of politics is to care about success, but not too much. Success is like a mask that eats the face. The only way to make good use of power is to think of it as belonging to something else — the plight of the ordinary people, the future good of things, the possibility for progressive, imaginative and generous alternatives to whatever is wrong or lacking in today’s Indonesia.

The writer is a lecturer in the postgraduate program at the Driyarkara School of Philosophy, Jakarta.