December 29, 2008

Eric Ellis, Jakarta

Corruption is the hot election issue, but the biggest fish are yet to be fried

 

It’s early days in Indonesia’s election season, but already Jakarta is transformed into a riot of colour. Political bunting of all shades sprouts from every conceivable vantage point, brightening the grey of poverty; the green of the surging Islamist parties; the red and black buffalo of the party of Sukarno’s eldest daughter Megawati; the yellow of Golkar, the clan of the late kleptator Suharto and his cronies. Posters and promises garland walls, bridges and streetside food stalls. Some even sponsor the capital’s flotilla of kaki lima — literally ‘five feet’ — pushcarts that dispense snacks of sate, tropical fruits and sometimes salmonella. As our car sinks into another flooded pothole in a downtown street, I’m particularly taken with a black-hued poster from a group campaigning to stamp out corruption, still the blight of this 63 year-old country after 53 years of autocracy and a wobbly decade of democracy. Korruptors! Hukum Mati! it screams in Bahasa Indonesia: ‘Death penalty for corruptors!’ If long-suffering Indonesians’ grumbles are any sort of psephological guide, this ticket should sweep the New Year polls.

Corruption is a constant in Jakarta. Indonesia annually jousts with the likes of Nigeria, Somalia and Burma for the dubious honour of which country is more crooked, as measured by the watchdog Transparency International (TI). Suharto, who the World Bank claims embezzled as much as $35 billion from the state during his 30-year dictatorship, turned graft into a way of life that today’s civil society now struggles to cleanse. Current President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono won office in 2004 by promising clean hands, and for a year or so bent governors had their collars felt; a few mayors too. But then it all went quiet. SBY is now bidding for a second term and the new star of his cabinet is the comely finance minister, Sri Mulyani Indrawati. At 46, and not from the traditional political class, she has a take-no-prisoners approach to graft in her ministry, and would like it to lead others by example. But her clean-skin remit is limited. A former IMF official, she is a skilled technocrat but no politician. Her influence doesn’t seem to reach into the back rooms where cash-stashed briefcases are exchanged. But the palace knows that if the popular Mulyani were muscled out of office, international confidence in Indonesia would dive.

 

Indonesia has improved its TI ranking and with an election due, corruption is front-page news again. The Corruption Eradication Commission has new mojo in going after politicians and businessmen. In recent months, it has zeroed in on a national police chief, various sleazy ambassadors scamming visas, a senior prosecutor, a presidential in-law — and even the conduct of the central bank. Parliamentarians of many stripes took backhanders proffered by central bank officials to get advantageous laws passed. The state’s missing money runs into the billions, and some of it is yours, from the funds international donors provide. The bank’s governor was arrested and for a time directed Indonesia’s interest-rate policy from remand prison.

I attended the recent inauguration of the new central bank governor Boediono at Jakarta’s Supreme Court, and it was quite an occasion. About 500 grandees lined up to pay their felicitations as he was sworn in, while Australian crooners Air Supply serenaded them with ‘The One That You Love’ through a croaky tannoy. Two guests made a big show of being photographed with the new governor; beaming vice-president Jusuf Kalla, one of the country’s richest men, and, through gritted teeth, the bank’s deputy governor Miranda Goeltom, now twice overlooked for the governorship. The fastidiously groomed Goeltom last paraded herself so publicly when making a pilgrimage to Suharto’s deathbed in January. Miranda normally gets a positive press but is now maintaining an uncharacteristically low profile — after a whistle-blowing parliamentarian explained how he received $50,000-odd of travellers cheques when he and committee colleagues voted to re-appoint her as deputy governor. Investigators want to know where the money came from and if senior slots on the central bank board were ‘bought’ by business interests. Goeltom pleads ignorance of such shenanigans — while the canary parliamentarian promises to hand back his new Mercedes.

 

Still, the biggest fish of all — various members of the Suharto clan, who plundered the country while Daddy was dictator — are yet to be fried. They still control huge sections of the economy through frontmen, and seem untouchable. Until they are dealt with, many analysts say, Indonesia can’t truly claim to be serious about fixing corruption. I rued Suharto misrule recently when making an early morning dash for the airport. Halfway along the tollway, cheaply built in a mangrove swamp by his rapacious daughter, it disappeared under a metre’s depth of a higher tide than usual. I just made my plane, but only after being soggily transported with dozens of other commuters, jammed in the back of an army truck which had been requisitioned for this national duty. It almost made me yearn for Heathrow.

Another of the country’s richest is also the minister for the poor. Aburizal Bakrie and his family control a natural resources enterprise, but he insists that his two occupations are not connected. Indonesians are not so sure. They suspect him of helping bankroll the current government’s run to office — a charge he denies — with his cabinet job as dividend. The Bakrie family has been around longer than Indonesia has been independent from the Dutch, their wealth almost tripling to $5.4 billion while he’s been in office earning a $1,600-a-month official salary — all down to booming commodity prices, he claims. Never very popular as a politician, welfare minister Bakrie is nearly as toxic as the family-owned oil and gas well that exploded in 2006 to ooze stinking mud over an eight-mile strip of East Javanese villages. Bakrie blamed a minor earthquake.

Bakrie companies have been hard hit in the credit crisis. Their shares have fallen more than 90 per cent, and they owe billions to foreign bankers. Amid talk of government bail-outs, the popular schadenfreude at Bakrie’s plight is palpable. I interviewed the effusive Aburizal last month and asked him to pledge to Allah with hand on heart that he’d never done business while in cabinet. And as he did so, I thought I heard a collective ‘hmmm’ hum across the archipelago.