Markus Junianto – Indonesia is breeding new generations of corrupt officials faster than authorities can crack down on the scourge, a top official has warned.
Hajriyanto Thohari, a deputy speaker of the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), said on Sunday that recent revelations about young civil servants in possession of bank accounts worth billions of rupiah (hundreds of thousands of dollars) each confirmed the trend.
"This means that the regeneration of corruptors is happening so fast that the efforts by the KPK [Corruption Eradication Commission] to stamp it out just can't keep up," he said.
He added the phenomenon was apparent even before the Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Center (PPATK) revealed the information about the bank accounts last week, and could be seen in the rise of immensely wealthy young politicians such as 33-year-old Muhammad Nazaruddin of the Democratic Party.
Nazaruddin is currently standing trial for rigging a bid to build an athletes' village for last month's Southeast Asian Games.
Hajriyanto attributed the problem partly to social changes that were making Indonesians more permissive than ever of criminal and corrupt behavior. This attitude, he said, was now creeping into the bureaucracy.
He added that he had received several reports indicating that although the heads of particular government offices were not themselves corrupt, the officials around them were. Rather than address the problem, though, the leaders were overlooking them out of this sense of permissiveness, he said.
"So what you get is even ministers pretending that they don't know that their underlings are 'players,'?" he said. "It's this permissive attitude that needs to be erased."
Ahmad Farhan Hamid, another MPR deputy speaker, said any state official raking in more than Rp 1 billion ($111,000) a year should be questioned because that kind of income for a bureaucrat could not be justified.
"Even if they spent nothing from their salaries, they still wouldn't be able to save that much," he said. "If they're not also businesspeople, then there's no way they can make that kind of money."
Farhan said that to stop a new generation of Indonesian government officials and politicians practicing corruption, it was important for political parties to be more stringent about their recruitment criteria and to monitor each member's personal wealth closely.
He called on party elites to get the ball rolling by forcing their own parties to be more open.
"They can do this by requiring all the members of their party to submit a wealth report," he said. "The problem is that such a policy will not be welcomed by political parties."
In its recent report, the PPATK said that since 2002 there were 1,800 alleged corrupt actions carried out by civil servants, including young civil servants. The most recent case involves 10 civil servants aged between 28 and 38 who have bank accounts worth billions of rupiah each.
Several members of the House of Representatives have also come under scrutiny for sudden increases in wealth since taking up office, including Nazaruddin and fellow Democrat Angelina Sondakh, whose own wealth increased 10-fold.
The KPK noted that in December 2003, before she became a legislator, Angelina had a reported wealth of Rp 618 million. By July 2010 she had Rp 6.1 billion.