Three Actions of Indonesian Youth for Fighting Corruption, inspired by Denmark

As the second least corrupt country in 2017 by Transparancy International, Denmark has a great vision to become the leading country of tackling corruption issues. Various things can be taken from Denmark to uphold the anti-corruption actions which important for the Indonesian youth right now. Things like integrity, knowledge and morality are important in the past and will always are at this time. But in the situation where we as the Indonesian youth do not only chase dreams but we make one of those things are not enough. Until a couple years ago, I was only a first year student of petroleum engineering, a major which relates closely to the action of bribary in the workfield. Unlike another college student, I consistently told by the lectures about the importance of  integrity as an engineer by the fact that there are many chances that tempt your faithfulness of the truth in many projects of oil and gas, especially in Indonesia. Furthermore, the workers, citizen, environment even your own life are the matters that need to be considered when you face bribary since many bad impacts that came over that actions. Being the listener of all those issues made me inspired to be a leader which letting me take control and leading clean actions against corruption. We are our own leader of anti-corruption actions and we are accountable for what we are doing. So, how can we as Indonesian youth contribute to the fight against corruption with inspiration from Denmark?

The first one is building the professionalism. In the past, Indonesian youth tended to be “jack of all trades but master of none” which means Indonesian youth were able to do many things but was not an expert in any. In other words, Indonesia lacked specialist or expert than the generalist. Specialization is the road of professionalism and professionalism is the road of anti-corruption. Individuals with the specific expertise will bring the expectation of many people about trust and quality when handling work. Moreover, specialization makes all individuals realize about the consequances for being unprofessional (in this case : corruption) because the fame of trust and quality of themselves. Denmark had applied the specialization for its community since the young age by adjusting the education based on their passion to the students specifically. Nowadays, Indonesia tries to escalate the specialization by the vocational school or professional training and program. One action for fighting against corruption is joining those programs or for the bachelor degree you can get master or doctoral degree to be more expert of your own study. By easier access of information right now, becoming a professional youth is practically going global. Therefore, Indonesian youth have to develop continuously a professional work ethic where the system is acceptable around the world so at the end, there will be no more corruption in this country because of the unprofessionalism.

The second is be an creative and active agent. Creativity has many positive benefits in the sense that builds and creates opennes to the new ideas and guards against groupthink where people who were alike tended to think alike especially for fighting the corruption. Spreading corruption issues is the main goal and creativity is the key of corruption issues’ acceptability to the community. Small corruption issues like unpunctual to the schedule, cheating and dishonesty are the part of corruption that need to be reminded to the community cause fighting corruption can be started from those small things. Besides, the big corruption issues at the government, company, politician and etcetera are also important to be announced by the youth. The point is besides creative, you must be an active youth who put attention to the issues. As a member of Badan Eksekutif Mahasiswa of ITB, I have many experiences related to the corruption issues. We usually study the corruption’s case intensively with the real-source data and gather many informations and after that we made the infographic about the study’s result that can be understood easily by the other college students. Creativity plays its role in here including the way we choose to spread the infographs by many platform to make people at least know what happens. Sometimes we gave our studies’ result about the issues to the government, even do the demonstration if we think that it is necessary to control the government as the act of fighting against corruption in Indonesia.

That skill an Indonesia youth should have to fight against the corruption is technology adaptability especially the Internet. According to the expert, Denmark citizens are the most advanced in the use of Internet and also the most digital country in the Europe. This does not mean the youth needs to be a technologist, but he has to understand what will influence our life. One-third of all, data will live in or pass through the cloud, including the government data. By providing interconnected system, you can optimize and provide easier access to the government management of state fund for example which will become an action for controlling the government. Besides, related to the previous action, social media is the best platform to spread the anti-corruption campaigns or to tell the studies’ result of corruption issues in Indonesia creatively. The benefit of this platform is the wider range of community or target that can be reached.

Indonesian youth in the future may face even greater challenges of corruption than now. As they say, the strongest tree of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun. With eagerness, hard work and intergrity, I believe one can change anything. Having all above ways are not enough. The actions only get into the business, but the rest of the journey lies entirely in us.