Ahok: Transparency is Key to Jakarta's Current E-Budgeting Woes

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Former Jakarta governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama was reluctant in answering questions about the current Jakarta governor, Anies Baswedan, who criticized the electronic budgeting system the city applied during Basuki’s era. 

The former governor maintained that he helped pass the e-budgeting platform as a means to promote transparency within the city administration. 

“I don’t want to comment, I already forgot, what’s sure is that the e-budgeting was to let everyone know about Jakarta’s regional budget spending,” said the former governor in a text message today, Oct. 31.

He further said that the e-budgeting enables every Jakarta citizen to probe the government’s expenses. 

“Everyone who interested in the city’s regional budget expense can obtain the data from e-budgeting. It reveals purchases on ballpoints, 'aibon' glue, up to uninterruptible power supplies,” said Basuki.

Speaking of glue, Governor Anies Baswedan became subject to heavy criticism after Jakarta’s e-budgeting revealed that the city had filed a massive budget of Rp82 billion to purchase ‘aibon’ glue and Rp124 billion for the purchases of ballpoints. 

Responding to the extremely transparent feature in Jakarta’s bureaucratic system, Anies called the e-budgeting “not smart” that it did not be able to detect oddities when officials input its budgets. 

Answering Anies’ allegations of the system being far from perfect, Ahok maintained that the e-budgeting can work perfectly when transparency is applied. 

“The system will work fine if the person inputting the data does not intend to mark up the prices, let alone stealing some amount,” he said.

ANTARA