“Endemic” and “corruption” are a couple of words that are often found together when speaking about Indonesia; it’s a country which lives with and expects bribery and corruption. I once had a chat with a guide in Bukit Lawang about his son’s future; I asked if he wanted him to be a jungle guide too. He replied that he wanted his son to be a policeman because he could make a lot of money.
“From the bribes?” I joked.
“Yes,” he said, finding nothing funny in my question. “Indonesia is corrupt and always will be.”
A pessimistic outlook but he’s probably right, and the chances of his son becoming a policeman are slim considering his father’s meagre income as a guide. A potential candidate for the police force must pay up to RP 100, 000, 000 (£5,500) in bribes to be accepted and ‘guarantee’ passing the exams. Considering that the average monthly wage for an Indonesian is around RP 500,000 (£27) the prospective initiate will have to borrow the money and then pay it back by extracting money from ‘criminals’, whether this is from a motorcyclist wearing the wrong kind of helmet or more sinister dealings is not important; they have to take bribes to pay the money back. In fact, as I sit here now in my local bar, the TV is showing an advert about combating corruption; scant hope: While Denmark, Finland and New Zealand top the list of least corrupt countries in the world according to Transparency International, Indonesia comes in at 144 out of 180 in 2007, maintaining its position from the previous year and falling four places from the year before despite very public campaigns to eradicate corruption.
It’s exam time in the curriculum schools here; those of us working in private language schools aren’t affected, other than having a temporary drop in attendance and those that do attend, yawning more often than is usual. But we do get to hear the stories; the latest being about a school here in Medan which has been giving its students the answers to the exams beforehand, obviously wishing to cover up the inadequacies in their teaching methods and hoping to attract more wealthy students to their school after achieving such excellent results.
In a rare spurt of interest in my students’ lives I asked one of the classes if any of their teachers had ever given them the answers to their exams. One student replied that she hadn’t been given the answers by any teachers but had got them from a family friend’s brother’s uncle’s father-in-law’s (etc) acquaintance who worked for the examination board. She pulled a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket and showed me the multiple choice answers for one particular test.
“Don’t you think that cheating in your exams is really just cheating yourself?” I rather wetly asked.
“Oh, I only look at the answers that I don’t know,” she answered.
Following up my previous entry, I thought I’d tell you about the Mayor’s Office here in Medan as it has recently been in the news. Back in January of this year, the Mayor and his deputy were arrested after a ‘misappropriation’ of funds involving the procurement of fire-engines cost the government in excess of twenty nine billion rupiah; a figure I would convert for you but my calculator doesn’t have enough digits. Although this was a crime worthy of a jail sentence, their previous shenanigans were not; I refer to the case of Medan’s zoo in which the mayor and his partner-in-crime sold the state owned animal sanctuary to themselves for a rock-bottom price and then sold it on to a private company for a nice fat profit.
However, the fire-engine fiasco was enough to kick into action the Corruption Eradication Committee, otherwise known as The Graft Busters. The diabolical duo have now been removed from their public duties for over five months while investigations continue and this has left a bit of a vacuum at the Mayor’s Office.
The Jakarta Post reported today that while the boss has been away, the staff have been abandoning their posts to go shopping and hang out at malls leaving nobody to man the offices between the opening hours of 10 till 4. This type of thing has been common recently the JP informed us, and people wishing to speak with officials often had to go and meet them at local markets or malls.
Medan Municipal Secretary Afifuddin Lubis refuted the claim that the staff were in any way taking advantage of the boss’s absence, saying that:
“Working conditions are continuing as usual.”
