M

ost educated Indonesians hate democracy. They aren'€™t much different from their counterparts in Thailand. The fact is if you asked the military to overthrow President Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo, you would end up with something far worse.

I really do find it irritating that people place so much trust in the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK).  The reason why the KPK is small is not because the elite wishes to make it small; it is because it is hard to find people in Indonesia who have never bribed or taken a bribe in their lives. That is why there are only 1,000 KPK staff members after 10 years. The problem is not the Indonesian elite, but Indonesian society itself! The KPK only accepts about one out of 300 applicants that apply because Indonesian society is so corrupt.

If Jokowi had selected a different three-star general (they are the only ones he can pick by law), another faction within the police would have gone to the KPK and spilled the beans. None of the three-star police generals are clean. I think the KPK is wasting everyone'€™s time with this charade and it really doesn'€™t help the ultimate objective of reducing corruption.  It'€™s tokenism.

The focus in Indonesia should be on preventing corruption in the first place, instead of focusing on arresting people when it happens. To effectively eliminate corruption with the KPK approach, you need a staff of 30, - 40,000.

Indonesian justice is moving toward the Western style, where rich, high profile people are arrested to give the impression of justice, while people who are merely rich, but are not high-profile, get away with all sorts of crimes. Corruption will only decline when everyone has the possibility of being arrested and sent to jail. The civil servant who squeezes US$200 a day from the public over three to four years is no different from the businessmen who bribes a civil servant $100,000 in a one-off payment.

What distinguishes Indonesia from Malaysia is that corruption in Malaysia is concentrated at the top, while in Indonesia it is from top to bottom. That is why Malaysia scores much higher than Indonesia on clean government, even though no one at the top has been taken down.

What the KPK does in reality has had little impact on preventing corruption that affects most people because by law it can only go after cases above Rp 1 billion. I would really like to see 1,000 junior or middle-ranking tax collectors go to jail than one or two senior ones, because the Indonesia government is serious only when ordinary people are sent to prison, instead of the silly show we are seeing now.

Weilim
Jakarta