In case you haven’t heard, Indonesia slipped a few places in Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perception Index (CPI), and that doesn’t seem to be a wake up call for introspection for some people in the government.
For its 2022 edition, the Berlin-based NGO ranked Indonesia 110th out of 180 countries based on perceived levels of public sector corruption from surveys on experts and businesspeople.
Indonesia scored a measly 34 points in this year’s index — a four-point regression from 2021, when the country ranked 96th overall. The year-on-year difference represented the biggest drop in points since Indonesia’s democratic reforms in 1998.
So do we blame this negative perception on corrupt officials or the people catching them?
We don’t doubt Coordinating Political, Legal, and Security Affairs Minister Mahfud MD believes the former to be the main cause. Yet when asked about the matter today, the senior minister made a link between the low score and the Corruption Eradication Commission’s (KPK) tendency to carry out widely publicized sting operations to catch corrupt officials.
“We expected [the low score]. There have been many sting operations lately. Corruption is happening everywhere. I expected that public anger would swell, and so the perception [for corruption] would be bad,” Mahfud said.
That is an almost like-for-like statement made by another senior minister, Coordinating Minister of Political, Legal and Security Affairs Luhut Panjaitan, who in December said that he did not wish for Indonesia to be renowned for corruption sting operations.
To be fair to Luhut, he did stress that the way to combat corruption in Indonesia is not to focus efforts on catching offenders, rather in fixing systemic failures that embolden officials to be corrupt in the first place.
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