DO YOU PAY BRIBE? (1) While it’s the rich that are most in the position to pay bribes or to grease their bureaucratic encounters, it’s the poor that are most often squeezed for a few extra Rupiahs. The masses are regularly shaken down by corrupt officials from anywhere between Department of Education, Department of religious Affairs to the cash aid distributors. However, not everyone who’s ever paid a bribe was tricked or forced into it. Many times people know they are paying a bribe, but they do it anyway. Because it is just so convenient and everyone in the land are doing it. So why bother? Every single one of us seems to think this way, so no wonder why the practice of graft is rampant everywhere in the country and becoming more and more difficult to deal with just like a cancer that has been spreading to the whole part of the body. For example, when you apply for Indonesian passport, ID Card (KTP), Land certificate, Land Registry, (Sertifikat Hak Milik Rumah dan Tanah) or so called STNK, just to name but a few; it is suggested to you that 5, 10 or 5 hundred thousand Rupiah court turn the drawn out and time consuming process into a fast and hassle-free one. How many of you, or us for that matter, ever refused such a suggestion? When given the choice between paying or dealing with ineptitude people, time and again, are tempted to bribe their way in. Would you preferred to have your application last for months in slow-moving office on a paper-and-pencil system? Or you pay someone with the harmless sounding justification, so it get done faster. When you pay to get something done or to avoid hassle, it makes corruption in your country incrementally worse. You’re feeding the beast, keeping the corruption system alive and healthy, putting it to work for you at the expense of everyone else, and most likely yourself, at a different place and time. Consumer awareness is not the only problem. Low pay for police officers, low motivation for enforcing anti-corruption laws, mismatched penalties were paying hundred thousand or some millions Rupiahs is far preferable to suffering some overly severe, pulled-out-of-thin-air fine or punishment. Overly annoying red tape, and even an uncomfortable, airless waiting room people would pay not to spend three, four and even five hours in, are the sort of conditions that give rise to bribery and corruption. Widespread corruption is proof that Indonesians right now have a self-destructively high tolerance level of the practice of graft, dishonest or illegal activities in politics or business that involve giving people money or advantages in exchange for their help or support while claiming to be religiously faithful. So it is incumbent on us, all decent Indonesian people to concentrate on destroying the practice of graft by seriously changing the way we think of corruption. Yes, the solution have to be a shift in mind-set. Not accepting that corruption is unchangeable part of the system. We should aim for that with realistic goals. Of course we are all aware that we can’t eradicate corruption completely overnight, but with determination we, all of us, can bring it down enough that the country works. Let us focus, first of all, on the grassroots, low-level forms of public corruption, and keep sensational, high-level central and local government out of their wheelhouse, as well as tough nuts like tax office or internal revenue and the vast sea of private company corruption. It does seem small. But those small things really add up. Take for example, Customs (bea cukai). It’s just one of many agencies, public and private, that’s a hotbed of corruption that estimated result in shortfall hundreds of billions or even trillions Rupiahs. Now the most important question to ask is this: “Can you trust your government, local or central? If you can’t trust your government to perform even the most basic task in tackling the problem of corruption, how can you trust it to run the country?” (To be continued)
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 09:08:30 +0000
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