The 2014 Village Law was passed under Jokowi’s predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, but it was enacted only in 2015. The government has increased its annual budget allocation for the village funds since the program began, from Rp 20.67 trillion in 2015 to Rp 46.98 trillion in 2016, to Rp 60 trillion in 2017 and in 2018, and to Rp 70 trillion in 2019.

According to the Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW), the abuse of these funds has also increased rapidly. The ICW recorded 181 corruption cases in 2015-2018 that involved 184 suspects and incurred losses of Rp 40.6 billion. Most of these cases (141) involved village heads. In Flores, for example, Petrus Kanisius, the now former head of Runut village in Sikka regency, was jailed for three years for embezzling almost Rp 380 million from the 2017 village fund.

I have conducted my own research through in-depth interviews with some key informants, such as retired civil servants, bureaucrats, politicians and contractors, to examine the extent of the corruption at the local level in Flores, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT). Corruption sometimes cases appear in local newspapers — especially media owned by the Catholic church, like Flores Pos, and which have not been co-opted by media oligarchs in Jakarta and is less controlled by political and economic elites at both local and national levels. Local journalists commented that the cases that made it to court were just the tip of the iceberg.

Bribery and kickbacks in the procurement process for public infrastructure projects are widespread in NTT. According to contractors and retired senior bureaucrats in Boawae, project contractors in Flores are often forced to provide up to 10 percent of the total project value to the heads of local legislative councils (DPRDs), regents or the heads of regency government offices before they are awarded contracts. In some cases, multiple officials each demand a 10 percent kickback, meaning that illicit payments can often exceed this amount, leaving much-reduced funds for actual construction.

I identified many examples of poor quality infrastructure that were built by central government-funded contractors during my field research. (These exclude locally funded infrastructure by villages in Flores, which generally had better quality because the villagers built them for themselves with funding from the village administration.)

In Nagekeo regency, for example, an office building in Boawae district remains vacant two years after construction finished. Officials say that they were afraid to use it because it began falling apart even before it was tenanted. In Borong, East Manggarai regency, the road connecting the villages of Lehong and Peot, built at a cost of Rp 9 billion, was in use for just one year before it was damaged by heavy rain, and has been impassable since 2017.

Similarly, the road connecting the villages of Bugis, Cambir and Sola in East Manggarai were already in poor condition last December, just one month after construction had completed.

Several roads and bridges in NTT were built during or close to the rainy season, providing a ready-made excuse if the project failed. Local governments can then request additional funds for repairing failed projects, usually at significantly inflated costs.

For example, the Lembata regency administration built a bridge in Waima at a cost of Rp 1.6 billion.

But when the bridge collapsed in a flood, the Lembata administration requested Rp 30 billion to rebuild it. It seems that local governments and politicians use infrastructure projects as a means to beg for money from Jakarta, which they then skim off.

In Nagekeo, I found several roads that were built during the rainy season and because of their poor quality, some of these roads were subsequently destroyed in heavy rain.

What has allowed such rampant corruption to occur? It is a combination of factors: an uncritical press and culture.

It is not difficult to buy the media in eastern Indonesia. Approaching the April 2019 legislative election, many local newspapers began covering local politicians’ promises and their criticisms of government. Such coverage is rarely free, according to Yosep Mane, a politician and retired Boawae district head. As a result, the local media is rarely critical of government.

The local media may not do its job, but neither can the people in eastern Indonesia rely on the national media, which are extremely Jakarta-centric and tend to ignore local issues.

As a result, anticorruption agencies in Jakarta like the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) and the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) and their regional offices in provincial capitals like Kupang in NTT were less likely to hear about corruption in the regencies and villages of eastern Indonesia.

Another factor that has played a role in escalating corruption is local cultural norms that are permissive of corruption, through a tendency to consider the consequences for the perpetrator’s family before reporting the perpetrator for corruption and other offences. For example, an Elections Supervisory Agency official from Nagekeo told me that the agency was well aware of the extent of vote buying in the regency. His officials often identified electoral violations at the village level, he said, but typically reported them to prosecutors only if the media kept demanding that action be taken.

President Jokowi has placed strong emphasis on developing of the economy eastern Indonesia through infrastructure, but widespread corruption is hampering these efforts.

Corruption in eastern Indonesia cannot be solved simply by sending a larger number of KPK and BPK investigators. Given the above factors, civil society and the people need to play a greater role in calling out corruption and demanding action.

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The writer is a New Mandala Indonesia fellow at Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific in Canberra.

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