I

n survey after survey, particularly one conducted by Transparency International (i.e., Corruption Perception Index or CPI), Denmark consistently tops the rankings as the least corrupt nation in the world, year in and year out.

Denmark arrived at this enviable position, according to Francis Fukuyama (who posed that question in his 2011 book, The Origins of Political Order), because, among other reasons, the important roles played by the government and religion in improving the education and the living standards of the peasantry.

Instructively enough, those two factors are all that Indonesia has inadvertently neglected in its attempt to climb up the ranking ladder.

When the rank crawled up a little two years ago (from No. 118 to No. 114 in the same survey), it was hailed as proof of the success of Indonesia'€™s approach to fighting corruption, even when the actual corruption was still just as rampant: for every fraudster arrested another is caught, in a never ending vicious cycle, and the much desired deterrent effect is nowhere to be seen.

So, the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), the key player in the country'€™s fight against graft, has been criticized for its obsession with '€œeradication'€, with arresting people, and for not being involved enough with prevention and education, which happen to be part of its five-point mandate according to KPK Law No. 30/2002 and are the same two factors identified by Fukuyama on how to get to Denmark.

But even in eradication, the average size of corruption caught by the KPK is small: using ICW figures of the first six months of 2012 (when 597 people were arrested in connection with estimated state losses of Rp 1.22 trillion or US$9 million), the average size of corruption caught by the KPK was only Rp 204 million, a far cry from a corruption case of $700 million that is pending in a neighboring country.

The restitution returned to the government by the KPK was estimated to be Rp 113.8 billion in 2012. Compared to the commission'€™s budget of Rp 606.6 billion in the same year, it was a return of only about Rp 1 for every Rp 6 spent.

Given the state budget of Rp 2,019.9 trillion for 2015, clearly the effect of corruption is negligible in financial terms and it will get even smaller in the future as some of those arrested have been emboldened by the pretrial successes of some suspects and that the police and the Attorney General'€™s Office have now stepped up their own pursuit of corrupt officials, even competing with the KPK in the chase.

The KPK has also been accused of having created a climate of fear because government officials now feel afraid of disbursing state money for development programs for fear of arrest by the KPK.

The fear has even seeped into the realm of intellectual discourse, such as when those who are critical of the KPK, albeit for its improvement, have quickly been accused of being soft on corruption or of having some skeletons in their cupboards.

But the problem is not with the KPK; even if its achievements in dollars and cents are small, the symbolic value, as a visible sign of the anticorruption commitment and a moral rallying point, is enormous.

The real problem is conceptual; calling corruption an '€œextraordinary crime'€, or a '€œcrime against the people'€ is emotionally satisfying, but not realistic because corruption in Indonesia has penetrated all aspects of the society, or has become part of the '€œculture'€, according to the late former vice president Mohammad Hatta.
_____________________________

In eradication, the average size of corruption caught by the KPK is small.

It is almost impossible to reengineer a culture, Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo'€™s '€œmental revolution'€ notwithstanding, and no society has ever managed to eradicate corruption, not even Denmark.

It is almost certain that even Denmark has corruption, too, because its CPI score is only 91 to 92 out of 100.

It is a well-established social science that the distribution of evil tendencies in any general population follows the normal curve, i.e., the largest number in the middle of the curve constitutes '€œnormal'€ human beings (like the Danes, law-abiding and tolerant) but the 2 to 3 percent of people at one end of the spectrum will always do evil one way or the other no matter how hard you try to stop them.

So the ranking of countries on corruption does not mean the country at the top of the list has no corruption; it only means it is perceived as the least corrupt because the CPI is based on perception, not hard data. The ranking is a matter of degree and the survey is guesswork, not rocket science.

So, we need to put everything in perspective and take the long view: emphasize education, a la Denmark, about the evilness of corruption; also a la Denmark, improve the living standards of the poor, the villagers and the peasantry.

After all, it is no coincidence that the top-ranked countries with the least corruption are also the most developed and the countries at the bottom half of the list (including Indonesia) are also the less or least developed because corruption declines as development takes hold and not necessarily the other way around, as touted by the World Bank and others.

The fact of the matter is there has been no visible reduction in world-wide corruption because development itself is still a work in progress.

Even Denmark did not get to Denmark in a day but in hundreds of years and Indonesia will certainly take a lot longer to get there, especially if we are mired in misconceptions, stuck in doing the same old thing, loath to hear criticism, lose our sense of proportion and fail to explore or exploit new routes as we to try get to Denmark.
______________________________

The writer is a retired international civil servant.