Jakarta. President-Elect Prabowo Subianto is planning on beefing up Indonesia’s corruption crackdown as Indonesia is only days away before his inauguration ceremony.

Prabowo will officially become Indonesia’s eighth president on Oct. 20. Ahead of his inauguration, the defense minister spoke at Indonesia’s largest investment forum to give people insights to his upcoming policies. In an almost one-hour-long speech, Prabowo said that Indonesia should not hold back on improving what needed to be fixed, and that includes in its hunt for corrupted politicians.

“We have to be brave in improving ourselves. There are so many loopholes in our systems. We have to be fearless in our fight against corruption,” Prabowo said at the 2024 BNI Investor Daily Summit in Jakarta on Wednesday evening.

Prabowo told the conference that the fight against corruption called for a “comprehensive system”. The ex-army general also said Indonesia “must look for solutions instead of running from its problems”. To this end, Indonesia needs to find people with “the best brains and hearts”, according to Prabowo as he alluded to the criteria for his ministers.

“Someone with a great brain, but with a rotten heart is dangerous. They are even better at corruption," Prabowo said.

Prabowo also revealed that some of Indonesia’s outgoing leader Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s ministers would join his government as he finalized the cabinet makeup. Prabowo, however, did not go into details on who would be returning as ministers. Some members of Jokowi’s cabinet are chairmen of political parties that endorse Prabowo’s presidential nomination. This includes Golkar’s chair Bahlil Lahadalia who now serves as the energy minister.

“It is just like forming the national football team. We would look for the best players. We don’t care about who their parents are or their religion, ethnic group or race. It is more on whether they can do the job,” Prabowo said.

Indonesia did poorly in the latest Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) report. The country only scored 34 out of 100 in the 2023 CPI. The report puts Indonesia in 115th place out of 180 countries. The lower the CPI, the higher the perceived level of a country’s public corruption. The highest CPI score that Indonesia had ever gotten over the past decade was a 40 in the 2019 index.

More often than not, the anti-graft commission KPK announces government officials who are allegedly involved in corruption. Most recently, KPK named South Kalimantan Governor Sahbirin Noor as a corruption suspect.

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