According to infoplease.com, referring to Transparency International, Indonesia is listed at number 144 out of 180 countries of The 2007 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. It also listed Indonesia's 2nd President, M. Soeharto as the #1 of the World's Ten Most Corrupt Leaders with $15-35 BILLION of funds embezzled. For over 31 years of dictatorship, under Mr. Soeharto, Indonesia has been seeding its corrupt culture rooted into almost any government institutions. The infamous bribes accepted by the traffic police catching law breakers on the road, the "speed booster" to the official duration of the time it takes to process official documents (e.g. passport, driving license, etc). I can almost bet that half (if not more) of the driver's license document holders in the entire country have not gone through all the official procedures.
I am not gonna have a whole discussion about corruption here. But what had inspired me to write this post was what I had to go through this morning. I was at the immigration office to process the extension of my passport. The last time I went there was four years ago with my sister to produce both of our passports, and we actually needed them done "quick" for visa purposes. This time I have the whole month of the rest of my holiday, so I thought I'd give it a try doing it the official way (besides it costs a lot less! ;P). So I got in there, asked some people about the procedures, went to get the extension form, filled it in and proceed to the counters to submit the form. Now this is where they used to tell the person submitting of the official duration of the process and the cost for a "faster lane". Apparently the higher institutions have realized this and have implemented a new queuing system. So basically they now have one of those machines that produce numbered tickets. The system is Microsoft based as I could notice clearly the 'click', 'ding', and 'windows on and off' sounds as I was waiting ;P. This new system seemed to me like a good answer to fight those "line cutters" as everyone holds their unique continuous numbers depending on when they produce the ticket. So I touched the machine's screen, produced the ticket written 89 on it, and I looked at the digital screen showing 59. I thought oh well ive got the whole day for this.
An hour later, in the midst of my boredom starring at this two French boys playing their Nintendo DS's infront of me, I heard the 'Windows off' sound. And all of a sudden the digital screen restarted! I was devastated.. I asked the lady at one of the counters and she said "yes sir, we are having a lot of trouble with the new system.. please have a seat and wait while we try to fix this, meanwhile we will still keep calling out the numbers.." Apparently this problem comes and goes after that point and in the middle of every pause, they were calling out what I heard to be random numbers, and there were always a lot of people standing in front of one counter, not queuing.
I ended up waiting for 2 long hours....... And that's only to submit the application. It is going to take 7 days before I can come back for a photo and interview, and another 4 days to produce the passport.
I am not pointing anybody or thinking negatively, but could this be just another trick pulled out by the corrupt people? Or is it simply caused by failure of the implemented system? I had the chance to have a little chat with this guy whom I believe has a greater authority in that office (he was signing all the foreigners documents when I went to his office, and everyone coming in were calling him 'boss'), and he complained that the system that the government has given them is not working properly or has failed to deliver the promised capability. He actually told me that it was faster to process passports before they implemented any automations! As an engineer I had to disagree and was confused at the same time.. didn't they automate things to make the process quicker, easier and hassle-free? So what is it that keeps holding back the automation advancement in this country? is it the system/technology/infrastructure that's not capable of handling the cases here? Or the people that are just not trained properly to operate the system? Or is it just another effort of the old corrupts to preserve the classic, bad Indonesian habit?
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