W

ith corruption cases dominating media reports, it is hard for young Indonesians like us to see the light at the end of the tunnel for the country’s anticorruption campaign.

A Bogor district prosecutor was arrested after allegedly being caught red-handed taking bribes at his office. The fight against graft suffers further setbacks as corruption convicts only receive light jail sentences, not to mention remission. Most recently, regional corruption courts have acquitted defendants en masse, signaling the defeat of our judges, prosecutors and investigators entrusted with rooting out corruption.

Indonesia ranks 110th out of 178 countries in the global Corruption Perception Index (CPI) and has only crawled up one place since 2009. Our justice and political systems are perceived as the most corrupt in the world as a consequence of the index.

Something else that is really worrying is that when 51 young teacher volunteers were sent to remote villages across Indonesia under the Gerakan Indonesia Mengajar (Indonesia Teaching Movement) in 2010, every teacher, including me, witnessed dishonest practices during school
examinations.

When I was assigned to teach in a primary school in a coastal village in East Kalimantan, I noticed that my fifth grade pupils regularly cheated by copying friends’ answers during exams. I expressed my disappointment about their wrongdoing and explained how low it was to cheat.

I challenged the students to raise their hands and come clean about their misbehavior. I said that admitting mistakes and not repeating them was a very important part of being a grown up. Instead of handing down punishment, I asked the class to applaud those who had the guts to admit their guilt in order to show the students how their courage in being honest deserved a reward.

To encourage the students to uphold honesty and integrity, I convinced them to rely on themselves when facing school exams. What made me proud of them a few weeks later, however, was when some of my students came to report that they had refused a copy of an answer sheet offered to them by another teacher.

Thereafter, these brave students became ambassadors of the anticorruption fight in school, imposing discipline not only on themselves and their peers but, in many cases, on a corrupt education system that emphasizes high graduation rates rather than integrity.

Can we, as a community, act as bravely as those elementary students? Can we resist graft and bribery when opportunities are there? Do we promote honesty in our homes, offices and neighborhoods? Stories of honest people who have been treated badly for fighting corruption or upholding honesty should not discourage us.

Fortunately, there are a growing number of self-motivated groups who aren’t deterred. Among them is an independent group whose efforts have begun to spark greater changes. ClubSpeak (Youth Against Corruption Club) has perceived a lack of awareness and knowledge on the part of young people fighting corruption. Their aim is to offer reforms to the antigraft movement that will make it more innovative and attractive to millions of followers. Their vision is “to nurture a younger generation in Indonesia [that is] honest, progressive and
responsible in providing a positive influence on the environment.”

Combined with the growing interest among university graduates volunteering to teach in remote and underdeveloped schools under the Indonesia Teach movement, these natural-born agents of change may have a revolutionary impact in combatting graft.

As we can no longer rely on the justice system, let us take matters into our own hands. Let’s roll up our sleeves and fight the corrupt practices around us. We can start in our own homes and neighborhoods, offices, playgrounds and in the social media. Honesty does have a place in our society.

After all, anticorruption is not the private agenda of the President, Supreme Court, police, or the House of Representatives. Combating corruption is renouncing dishonesty and refusing to take the easy way out when there are opportunities to do so.

Each of us can and must be our own ambassador for anticorruption, because it’s our own integrity and future that are at stake. I for one don’t want to have to tell my children that the country we are living in will become more and more corrupt as they grow up.

The question now is simple: Are you braver than a fifth grader?

The writer is one of the Young Teachers from the Indonesia Teaching Movement (Gerakan Indonesia Mengajar) sent to Paser District, East Kalimantan, from 2010-2011.
He completed his bachelor’s degree with the International Relations Department, the University of
Indonesia, in 2010.