November 20, 2025

Indonesia’s free meals for kids program has left thousands of youngsters with food poisoning, and returned the country to the bad old days of military influence.

“All power flows from the barrel of a gun,” said Mao Zedong. His aphorism may have been right a century ago in China, but not in modern Indonesia. In the nation next door, power comes subtly via unarmed brigadiers in boardrooms. The riflemen are there, but out of sight.

Professional corporations with genuine jobs to fill normally advertise for the best certified and experienced applicants to stay innovative and competitive. Patronage appointments kill such management essentials.

Meat and veggie buyers, cooks, hygiene inspectors, nutritionists, quality controllers, agricultural advisors – there are scores of positions with Makan Bergizi Gratis (MBG) – the free meals for kiddies’ programme.

The venture is to stop stunting through malnutrition – a most worthwhile goal – so standards should be high.

They’re not. Much of the work is being done by young guys hired to kill but employed to care. No surprise that more than 10,000 children have reportedly been gripped by food poisoning,

Dirty kitchens, food left to the flies, delivery delays, and hands and workbenches unwashed – the list is extensive and the blame clear: kitchens are no place for enlistees.

Video grabs of screaming students on classroom floors, fouled by vomit and diarrhoea, have ensured widespread coverage and demands that the program be shut until fixed.

That won’t happen, because the initiator of this stench is President Prabowo Subianto, 74, who swept into power last year on the promise of free tucker. It remains his flagship policy, and to stall would show defeat – difficult for an ageing authoritarian who knows he knows best.

The goal is 75 million meals a week through 1,400 kitchens by the end of this year – the cost A$10 billion.

Next year, the budget is expected to blow out threefold. Economists fear health and education money boxes will get raided and services suffer, though not the military, which is on an international weapons-buying spree.

By 2027, the MBG could gallop past A$27 billion, overtaking the defence allocation of A$18 billion.

It shows what goes wrong when a voter-grabbing policy first scribbled on a restaurant receipt isn’t backed by thought-throughs on infrastructure and planning. The public gets fed up with delays in implementing promised change – but here’s a good reason why patience is prudent.

When Prabowo won the election last year and flaunted his pledge, the applause was worthy of a footy win, though players knew there were too few cooks and bottle washers and a dearth of commercial kitchens.

The solution? Conscript the army.

Soldiers who joined for adventure, a uniform, a haircut and the chance to shoot dissidents in Papua found themselves scrubbing food trays.

Corruption has reportedly flooded the fractured system as a tsunami of unchecked government cash swirls around the dishes of cold soup and burned rice. The service is a continuous rush; no time for audits.

The policy of employing the military in civic affairs was refined by the Republic’s second president, former army general Soeharto. When he was overthrown in 1998 by students preaching democracy, dwifungsi (two functions) was also ditched. Now it’s back with Prabowo, also a former general and Soeharto’s former son-in-law.

There are already ten departments and industries where the military rules. They’ve also seized 3.7 million hectares of private palm-oil plantations and handed them to a state-owned company.

The Kuala Lumpur-based youth NGO World Order Lab voiced its concerns: “Partisan loyalty has increasingly dictated appointments, often sidelining professional qualifications in leadership. This is no accident but a calculated strategy of power consolidation, which signals that loyalty and political stability outweigh technocratic competence.

“ Patronage appointments undermine the crucial link between responsibility and expertise, leaving critical programs in the hands of those unprepared to manage them.”

The military is getting bigger, spreading wider and digging deeper. Orwell’s Big Brother was a wimp when measured against the Indonesian military’s ambitions.

Expect uniforms everywhere. Regional commands will be doubled to cover most of the archipelago’s 38 provinces. One hundred ’territorial development’ battalions will deploy units in 7,285 kecamatan (districts) within five years.

This isn’t secret stuff – the Defence Ministry published a full-page explanatory ad in the Kompas newspaper. The headline read Bukan Lagi Sekadar Militer: Pertahanan Rakyat Gaya Indonesia (No longer just the military: Indonesian-style people’s defence). No need for a catchy title – it’s an order.

It listed plans to enlarge battalions specialising in health and agriculture between now and 2030, claiming these have expanded and transformed “people’s defence based on prosperity and cross-sector collaboration”. The reasoning here is impenetrable.

The ad was published  “to counter public perception that these actions represent militarisation.” The public’s perception has been clear – so have the commentators.

Veteran Bloomberg Asian affairs columnist Karishma Vaswani warned: “The military’s increased influence (is) potentially enabling human rights violations and corruption.

“(The Kompas ad) was an attempt to normalise the presence of soldiers and generals in everyday life, potentially giving them the kind of influence they had during the Soeharto era…. an outsized role in politics and governance.

“A rejuvenation of the military’s power will reinforce (Prabowo’s) image as a leader who cannot rule without the assistance of the army.”

The Tentara Nasional Indonesia (TNI – Indonesian armed forces) has embedded itself in the national legend for almost eight decades, starting with guerrilla heroes routing the returning Dutch colonialists in the late 1940s.

Through its untouchable status, the TNI has boosted incomes and officers’ salaries by running foundations, factories and co-ops. Men in khaki moved off parade grounds onto the boards of banks, insurance companies, and even big retailers.

Soldiers are supposedly prohibited from business activities, though this is widely overlooked. The TNI is proposing a law change so Army wives can run village kiosks, though the real reason is to legitimise jobs for officers in civil businesses.

Perceptive readers of Pearls and Irritations would have foreseen that Indonesia was sliding into the black pit of military control when a story was published of MPs in fatigues at a post-election boot camp.

The few who still uphold democracy were dismayed; others saw it as a chance for selfies of giggling pols flashing thumbs-up. They should have been down.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.

Duncan Graham

Duncan Graham has been a journalist for more than 40 years in print, radio and TV. He is the author of People Next Door (UWA Press). He is now writing for the English language media in Indonesia from within Indonesia. Duncan Graham has an MPhil degree, a Walkley Award, two Human Rights Commission awards and other prizes for his radio, TV and print journalism in Australia. He lives in East Java.