JP/DON

This has been a mixed week as far as the nation'€™s anticorruption campaign goes.

While news that President Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo and the House of Representatives have finally agreed on the appointment of Com. Gen. Badrodin Haiti as chief of the National Police, a disturbing piece of news was Badrodin'€™s plan to name Budi as his deputy.

As we may recall, the President and the House had initially agreed to appoint Budi as police chief in spite of strong allegations of corruption from the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK). The ensuing brouhaha eventually forced the President to cancel Budi'€™s nomination. If Budi was not good enough for the top job, logically he should not be given the number two job either.

Budi may have won the pre-trial motion at the South Jakarta District Court that forced the KPK to drop the corruption charges, but that doesn'€™t mean he is clean. This is something we will never know unless he answers the charges in a court of law. He may have skirted the law, but the allegations will haunt him, even in his new job.

What does his appointment as deputy chief, if it happens, tell us about the anticorruption campaign?

The future need not necessarily be bleak, not after the very same court rejected another pre-trial motion this week filed by former religious affairs minister Suryadharma Ali, whom the KPK has named a suspect in a corruption case concerning trillions of rupiah of haj funds.

In rejecting Suryadharma'€™s plea, presiding judge Tatik Hadiyanti said the court had no authority to overturn the suspect status of a person simply on the grounds of a lack of evidence, and that this was something for the defendant to argue in court. Judge Tatik contradicted the bizarre ruling her colleague, Sarpin Rizaldi '€” a justice on the same court '€” made to free Budi of KPK'€™s corruption charges.

There had been fears that Sarpin set a legal precedent that would open the floodgates for pre-trial motions from every person named a suspect by the KPK, and that this would grossly undermine the nation'€™s anticorruption campaign. Suryadharma was among the first to file the pretrial motions. Hopefully, this week'€™s ruling against him means the buck stops with Budi.

The justice system in Indonesia is in disarray. We have seen cases where people have been convicted, many harshly, on the flimsiest, or most circumstantial of evidence. The ruling against Suryadharma should tell us that there are still some good and sane people running the courts.

***

Leaders make gaffes all the time, but President Jokowi may have made one of the worst ever when he said he didn'€™t read every document  he signed.

This startling revelation came after he decided to revoke a presidential ruling he had earlier signed to give state
officials a generous sum of money as down payments for their official cars.

The ruling runs against his belief that officials don'€™t have to drive in luxury vehicles. As president-elect in September, he prevailed in demanding that outgoing President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono cancel a plan to replace the Volvo limousines that had been provided for Cabinet members, redirecting the money instead to his welfare programs when he came into office in October.

Naturally, when news broke out he had signed a decree that contradicted his own principle, the public was outraged. He duly rolled back the ruling, but the flip-flop was not as damaging to his reputation as the gaffe that has become the butt of all jokes on social media.

Jokowi pleaded ignorance about the issue, saying that since he signs hundreds of documents every day, he was not expected to read every single one of them. Instead, he argued, he was counting on his ministers to screen and select the relevant rulings for him to sign.

One thing we can say, however, is that at least the guy is being honest. But still, it raised questions about how many other documents he unintentionally signed because he didn'€™t have time to read them?  And he had passed the buck on poor Finance Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro, who could not answer when journalists asked for his response.

This April, Jokowi will complete his first six months in office, and he is still struggling to consolidate his position and to reconcile the conflicting interests and rivalries within his own coalition government.  

At least he got the National Police chief appointment out of the way by making a compromise. Jokowi will have learned by now that he needs to make more political compromises and to eat his famous proclamation of '€œno transactional politics'€. The challenge for him is to make sure that he takes more than he gives in all these compromises.

This week'€™s gaffe should also tell him that he should speak less (although he rarely says anything anyway), and get a professional spokesperson to speak on his behalf and articulate better his thoughts and policies to the public.

For a man of few words, he desperately needs a professional spokesperson.

'€” Endy M. Bayuni

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