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n mid-2012, then-president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono signed Presidential Regulation No. 55/2012 on the national strategy for corruption prevention and eradication in his bid to integrate antigraft campaigns carried
by various institutions in the country.

While the implementation of the strategy was criticized for its lack of tangible results, concerns were also raised about its failure to fully include the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) in the campaign.

Now, six years later, the KPK has a chance to play a bigger role in implementing the national anticorruption strategy, thanks to a newly issued regulation, which is also expected to push for more efforts to implement an integrated strategy to root out corruption.

On July 20, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo signed the long-awaited Presidential Regulation No. 54/2018 on national strategy for corruption prevention after almost two years of deliberation.

The new campaign will focus on three sectors derived from Jokowi’s nine-point development agenda, Nawacita, namely business permits and the commerce sector; state finance; law enforcement and bureaucratic reform.

To push for better implementation of the national strategy, Jokowi gave the KPK a role in the newly established graft prevention national team, which is mandated under the new regulation and tasked to synchronize and monitor its implementation by various government institutions.

The KPK did not take part in such coordination in previous years but merely gave its input when anticorruption action plans were drawn up.

Other members of the new team include officials from the National Development Planning Ministry, Home Ministry, Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform Ministry and the Office of Presidential Staff (KSP).

The antigraft body is now also responsible for hosting a national secretariat tasked to help the team in communicating corruption prevention measures. The secretariat initially was located at the National Development Planning Ministry.

“The recruitment [of staff] and other processes taken [by the national team and the secretariat] will be done under our budget,” KPK deputy for prevention Pahala Nainggolan said recently.

The KPK has long been seen as one of the most important institutions in the country’s corruption eradication campaign since the fall of the authoritarian New Order regime. It has uncovered a number of big cases and sent dozens of high-profile figures to jail.

In terms of preventive measure, activists said it was the KPK’s series of assessments of corruption risks in various sectors, most prominently in haj fund management.

But its recommendations often fell on deaf ears, raising doubts over the antigraft commitment of government institutions being assessed by the KPK.

Under the new regulation, such assessments could now become a foundation for the team to build a detailed action plan to prevent corruption.

“This time, the action plan will be simplified. I would say that there will be only nine big plans [in the action plan],” Pahala said.

Last week, the national coordination team, which has three months to draft the action plan after the regulation was issued in July, held its first meeting at the KPK’s headquarters.

Activists lauded the KPK’s participation in the latest antigraft strategy, with Wawan Suyatmiko of Transparency International Indonesia (TII) saying one of challenges was how to ensure that its participation would result in tangible actions and prevent the national strategy from serving as a paper tiger.

“Moreover, ahead of next year’s general election and a change of KPK leadership, it is also important to make sure the execution of the national strategy will keep going as expected,” Wawan said.