Devi Asmarani, Jakarta – Millions of poor Indonesians are among the hardest-hit by corruption, as various unofficial levies charged by low-level officials are eating into their meagre earnings.
A recent survey conducted by the World Bank and the Partnership for Governance Reform Indonesia showed that the poor were affected by corruption in almost all aspects of their lives – right down to their waste disposal.
According to the study on "Corruption and the Poor" – which interviewed 1,250 households in Jakarta, Yogyakarta and Ujung Pandang, South Sulawesi – corruption involving garbage disposal ranked as one of the most common of all irregularities. In densely populated slums in East Jakarta, for example, each household has to pay two different garbage collection fees – one for the local community units that manage the garbage disposal, and another for the Office of Sanitation. There is no clear explanation as to why each household has to pay twice.
Officials with the state-electricity company (PLN), the police and schools are considered by the poor to be the most corrupt. Other abuses also occur in the issuance of identification cards and in the disbursement of the social-safety net aids. PLN officials are notorious for offering speedier services at higher prices to install or increase power capacity to customers who do not want to wait for the regular, sluggish PLN service that could take three months.
The police force is notorious not just for soliciting bribes from traffic violators, but also for extorting people they apprehend. A 45-year-old construction worker, who was caught stealing a small bicycle for his three-year-old son, was asked for 200,000 rupiah to be released by the police. "If I had that much money, I would not have stolen to begin with," the man said.
Ironically, schools are also where much corruption takes place. In public schools, parents are often asked to pay various charges for everything from uniforms and textbooks to building maintenance. One school charged students 100,000 rupiah each for building maintenance fees, despite the 35,000 rupiah fee that the government limits schools to charge. Sometimes, individual teachers blatantly ask for money from parents, as in the case of Madam Chotijah, who had to pay 15,000 rupiah to a first-grade teacher in order to get her daughter's grade-report book. One high school even charged a mother a 30-per-cent annual interest rate on the payments she was making on a 350,000 rupiah "donation" she had to pay for her son's entrance to the school.
Project coordinator Stefanie Teggemann said the poor were powerless and their lack of education made them more susceptible to abuse. She added: "The rich people can use corruption in their favour – they can influence policy-making or buy legal decisions – whereas the poor people are powerless. They are more vulnerable to requests for bribes because they are not assertive enough to ask for official prices and regulations, let alone reports."
She said there should be more community empowerment to disseminate the idea that people can resist or stand up to corruption. But Mr Hamid Awaluddin of Partnership for Governance Reform said the fight against corruption should start from the top, with President Megawati Sukarnoputri declaring 'an anti-corruption regime' and beginning a massive clean-up of the bureaucracy.