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View all search resultsThe benefit of the doubt has expired
The government must urgently start turning its authority into results to fulfill the promises made to the people in 1945.
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A boy is treated for food poisoning at a Jakarta hospital on April 4, 2026, after consuming food provided via the government’s free nutritious meal program. (Antara/Fakhri Hermansyah)
I
n the first week of September, 1,961 people fell ill after eating food from the state's free nutritious meal program. The same week, prosecutors seized the assets of the man who ran that program until June, including US$240,000 found in a pickup truck. Across the sea, smoke from Kalimantan closed schools in Malaysia’s Sarawak state and turned the air over Manila unhealthy.
Bad luck does not arrive this neatly. This is what a government looks like when it has stopped turning authority into results.
Every new administration is owed patience; a feeding program cannot be judged in a year.
But a second category needs no waiting period. The disciplines that produce outcomes either exist on day one or they do not: whether decisions rest on data, whether rules stay fixed, whether people are appointed for competence, whether numbers are published.
For a year and a half, most of us withheld judgment on the first category. Nearly two years in, the second has been degraded so far it is now destroying the first.
The public got there first. Poltracking Indonesia's satisfaction rating fell from 78 percent last October to 55 percent in August. Twenty-three points in nine months is a verdict.
The pattern repeats. This government does not lack ambition; it launches at national scale before it designs, so its programs keep producing the reverse of what they promised.
