This joke of the day is brought to you by the fine folks at the House of Representatives (DPR).
Having just been named the institution perceived to be the most corrupt in Indonesia by Transparency International, it’s to be expected that lawmakers would go into full-on denial mode. But not even we expected such an audacious claim as the one made by House Speaker Setya Novanto.
“I don’t think anybody in DPR is corrupt. We all work transparently, carefully,” said the Golkar politician, as quoted by Kompas today.
We’re not sure what version of reality Novanto is talking about, but it’s not ours. In fact, Kompas noted that in 2016, two members of parliament were arrested by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) in 2016 on graft charges.
Maybe Novanto specifically meant that the current crop of lawmakers in parliament are clean?
“Even if there were [corrupt lawmakers], there were only a few, and it’s in the past. We have asked MPs to be careful not to abuse their power and authority,” he said.
Those words might come back to haunt him. Recently, the KPK summoned 25 lawmakers for questioning over their alleged involvement in a huge graft scandal in the procurement of electronic ID cards (e-KTP) in 2012. It would be surprising if no MP sees their head on the chopping block by the end of the investigation.
Apparently Novanto is also forgetting that he himself was in the middle of a huge political scandal, related to his alleged attempts to extort Freeport stocks, for which he stepped down as House Speaker in 2015 (only to be reinstated last year because evidently we’re such a forgiving people).
And then, of course, there was that time when he and a bunch of other MPs unethically expressed their support for Donald Trump before the US presidential election even started.
Well, at the very least, we can thank Novanto for giving us a good laugh.
