T

he fastest pace and widest breadth of reform taking place under President Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo'€™s 50-day-old government has taken place at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (ESDM) for the right reason.

The ministry administers, manages and oversees the development of natural resources (oil, natural gas and all other minerals) worth hundreds of billions of dollars in exports, import procurements, taxes and royalties every year.

In a country perceived as one of the most corrupt in the region, senior officials at the ministry and all other agencies under its jurisdiction, notably those with authority for supervision, licensing and procurement, are understandably vulnerable to corruption.

No wonder, Jero Wacik who was replaced last month by Sudirman Said, is now a corruption suspect and Rudi Rudiandini, the former chief of the Upstream Oil and Gas Regulatory Special Task Force (SKKMigas) is now in jail for graft.

 Jokowi'€™s first move in setting off reform at the ministry was appointing Sudirman, an anti-corruption activist and good-governance champion, as the new ESDM minister.

 Sudirman, an auditor by training, who also graduated from business management from George Washington University, has built years of experience in state and private oil companies and has demonstrated his managerial and leadership qualities in many institutions and organizations.

He was among the founders of the Indonesian Transparency Society antigraft movement and the Institute for Corporate Governance. Sudirman served for almost two years as a vice president at the state oil company Pertamina in charge of reforming its supply chains '€“ Pertamina was at the time considered one of the most inefficient and most susceptible to corruption. But he quit in 2009, reportedly owing to intense lobbying by a strongly influential oil mafia.

 Sudirman rightly selected the oil and gas sector of the mining industry as the first target of his bureaucratic reforms, again for a strategic reason.

The hydrocarbon industry plays a central role in the economy as it is still the main source of primary energy (about 70 percent), contributing almost 6.5 percent of the gross domestic product, US$31 billion in revenues to the national budget (23 percent) and $22 billion in foreign investments a year, of which 60 percent is spent on local goods and services.

 Indonesia is already mired in an oil crisis with the supply-demand gap exceeding one million barrels a day. Crude oil and fuel imports, which last year totaled $42.1 billion, have been responsible mainly for the ballooning current-account deficit and downward pressures on the rupiah.

Worse, according to the Indonesian Petroleum Association (IPA), oil reserve replacement was at only 47 percent last year. The association estimates that annual investments in exploration alone should be tripled to over $11 billion within the next five to 10 years to prevent a widening oil deficit and another $30 billion a year investment in production development is needed, or otherwise the oil deficit could reach 2.5 million barrels per day.

But which investors would be willing to risk so huge a sum of capital if an oil company requires almost 70 types of permits from the national and regional governments, involving 284 processes and 17 agencies, and is subject to land and building tax even during the exploration stage?

According to IPA, the average time needed by oil companies to monetize proven reserves has increased from five years in the 1970s to more than 10 years in the late 1990s and 15 years in the 2000s mainly because of the arduous licensing system, bureaucratic inertia and corruption.

Thus Sudirman'€™s quick decision taken just a few days after his inauguration, to replace the director general of oil and gas and the chief of SKKMigas, is quite strategic.

He also immediately started preparations for the selection of officials for the levels of directors general and directors at his ministry through an open, competitive recruitment process.

The appointment of Amien Sunaryadi, a former deputy of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), to head SKKMigas signals a massive shake up and reform within the regulatory body.

It plays a key role in the petroleum sector because this regulatory body oversees the management and business plans of all national and foreign companies operating in the hydrocarbon sector.

Sunaryadi'€™s previous experience as a senior operations officer for the Anti-Corruption Action Plan (ACAP), a cooperation program of the government and the World Bank'€™s Department of Institutional Integrity (DII), from 2009 to 2012, well equipped him with high managerial ability and technical competence to develop a strong institutional-integrity system at SKKMigas.

The DII has been well known for its success in establishing a strong integrity system within the multilateral development bank, which is constantly exposed to the risk of corruption and other forms of malfeasance as it operates in many developing countries.

The program was designed to build effective internal control mechanisms within projects or an institution able to explicitly identify governance-related risks to achieving project objectives, thus improving project-level governance.

The overall aim of ACAP is to improve management, monitoring and oversight within the Indonesian public sector.

Sunaryadi, an auditor by training, is believed to be able to disseminate within SKKMigas the expertise to audit business processes and eventually develop innovative ways to communicate with civil society organizations, soliciting public feedback on the quality of public services provided.

The reform of SKKMigas, combined with the recent slash of fuel subsidies to bring fuel prices closer to and eventually on par with the actual costs, would contribute greatly to mitigating the risk of corruption within the petroleum industry.