Campaign fever and the corruption crackdown make Indonesia sweat

Wednesday, 1st April 2009

President Yudhoyono may seem to be pandering to Islamists, but the grafters will be running scared if he wins another term, says Eric Ellis

With landmark elections due next week in Indonesia, I recently got a rich taste of how grassroots politics really works here.

Moving to Jakarta, we’d hired a flotilla of domestic staff drawn from Indonesia’s massive pool of the unskilled and uneducated who drift into the capital from impoverished villages in search of work and hope. There was a maid, a gardener, a pool attendant, a driver and a live-in ‘security’ guard, each engaged with a caution from neighbours that the $300 a month we intended to pay each of them — about treble Indonesia’s GDP per capita — was most irregular. Money defines class in Jakarta, and our newly-democratised neighbours didn’t quite say it would give their itinerant countrymen ideas above their station. It was more like: ‘You’ll make it bad for the rest of us if you pay this much.’

Then a new parade of supplicants padded to our door: hopeful handymen, possible plumbers, aircon guys, rubbish collectors, water vendors, the newspaper boy and, most intriguingly, a man who lived at the bottom of the street, whose self-appointed job was as vigilante deterring would-be miscreants. But surely that was the polisi’s job, I asked our security chap. One didn’t need fluent Bahasa to catch his scorn. ‘Polisi? Korupsi!’ he chortled, an Indonesian mantra. Law enforcement in Indonesia has been so polluted that freelancers have stepped into the vacuum. Privateer paladins patrolled territories of around 200 houses, levying 50,000 rupiah a month from each household, a nice little earner. It was only about $4, but since we already had security we saw the service as superfluous. Don’t even think about it, he explained, everyone pays because you never know what happens if you don’t. We paid for the sake of a quiet life.

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