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Jokowi’s development push leaves graft fight by the wayside
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Infrastructure first: Construction of a toll road that dissects Pulo Kerto village in Palembang, South Sumatra is underway on Dec. 12, 2021. The section will be part of the trans-Sumatra toll road. (Antara/Nova Wahyudi)
P
resident Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s economy-forward approach to development has left the country’s fight against corruption in tatters, critics say, as they point to a new global graft study that illustrates the scale of the regression.
Indonesia’s score on Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perception Index (CPI) slid four points to 34, the country’s biggest decline in 25 years and one of the worst year-on-year performances in the region.
The nation now ranks 110th of the 180 countries surveyed in the study, which was published on Tuesday, behind neighbors Singapore, Malaysia, Timor-Leste, Vietnam and Thailand.
Introduced in 1995, the CPI is a composite index that aggregates data from various sources to offer a measure of corruption levels by country. A CPI score of 0 indicates that a country is extremely corrupt, while 100 means it is free of corruption.
The latest CPI score serves as a snapshot of Indonesia’s downward spiral in the fight against graft. The country has fallen from a 2019 peak of 40 points and has now erased all the gains made during Jokowi’s presidency.
The new score also marks Indonesia’s worst decline on the index since 1998, when the CPI score dropped seven points at the tail end of then-president Soeharto’s notoriously corrupt regime.
“President Jokowi’s regime will go down as the worst in terms of corruption eradication since the start of the Reform era,” Indonesia Corruption Watch declared on Wednesday.
