$ 3.3 billion down the drain

It’s almost too  good to be accidental.

Last Friday was the World’s Anti-Corruption Day. And that very day they got her ! Nunun was nabbed and arrested at long last.

Nunun Nurbaeti is suspected of having bribed legislators in order to have another  notorious lady who has been convicted in the meantime, Miranda Goeltom, appointed by them as Bank Indonesia’s senior deputy governor. And by the way: rumours are that part of the bribe money in that case ended up financing Megawati’s presidential campaign in ’04.

No, there never is a dull moment in Indonesia where politics and business have created an elitist world of  patronage, graft and embezzlement.

It’s a commonplace, it’s a platitude: Indonesia copes with major corruption. It’s ranking number 100 on the Corruption Perception Index 2011 ( out of 180 nations), ex aequo  with countries like Gabon, Benin, Burkina Faso, Malawi and Tanzania.

Though it provides the media with lots of marketable news, it  actually is a very costly national vice.  Over the last five years at least $ 3.3 billion of government’s money went down the drain . And it also is labour-intensive. Over the same timespan the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) forwarded on average 65 cases a year to the appropriate law enforcement agencies.  Which, one may fear, is only the tip of the iceberg. The likes of Nunun really are a major roadblock to prosperity. Not so much the lady as an individual culprit. It’s likely she is just a pawn in a game of corruption. It rather is her being another component keeping  the corruption culture machinery going.

Goldman Sachs forecasts that by 2050 Indonesia’s GPD per capita will be about 7 times as much as it is now. Indonesia can be 10th largest economy by that time. And it may rank high on the list of economies which contribute most to the world’s economic growth.

This tempting  glorious future will remain out of reach if no serious improvements in the realms of social justice, infrastructure and cleaning up this culture have been accomplished. The indications are gloomy though. There only has been sluggish progress fighting corruption. The 2014 target for the Corruption Perception Index, which was 5.0 on a scale ranging from 0 – 10,  is way too ambitious according to Transparency International. It presently is 3.0. Seemingly at present efforts to deal with corruption are insufficient.

To improve chances of quenching the cultural roots of the socio-cultural and moral evil in the long run, the top down fight against corruption, by KPK for instance, probably needs complementary bottom up anti-corruption actions at school.

As it is I’m waiting for the next juicy corruption case. Bank Century is still on the shelves.