Why President Prabowo Subianto insists on continuing the free meal program remains a mystery, or perhaps not.
Logically and practically, it makes little sense. Thousands of students have already been poisoned by the meals served, with more than 9,000 cases reported in 83 regencies and cities across 21 provinces.
Parents complain of food arriving cold, stale or unhygienic. Doctors say the programme has no measurable effect on child stunting or malnutrition. Yet hundreds of trillions of rupiah are being poured into the scheme, sold to the public as a bold welfare measure but executed in ways that look far more like a patronage machine.
In its first year alone, the program had a budget of Rp 120 trillion, larger than the combined budgets of the Health and Agriculture ministries, despite no evidence it would improve learning outcomes or reduce malnutrition.
The sheer scale of this spending
would be defensible if it brought genuine improvements in child welfare. Instead, the record shows a litany of failures, from mass food poisonings to poor quality control and no clear nutritional gains. The only clear beneficiaries are not the nation’s children but the network of political cronies who sit closest to the president’s table.
The problems were evident from the beginning. Schools from West Java to East Nusa Tenggara reported mass food poisoning: in Sumedang, 87 children were hospitalised after eating contaminated rice and chicken; in Brebes, more than 130 fell ill from spoiled eggs; in Kupang, dozens were treated for diarrhoea. Local clinics confirmed the food boxes
provided under the government’s banner were the source of sickness.
Yet inspections were cursory, suppliers opaque, and quality control virtually absent. This failure reflects not just poor planning but also who has been entrusted to run the programme.
The institution meant to guarantee standards, the newly established
National Nutrition Agency (BGN), inspires little confidence. Its senior team is dominated not by nutritionists or food scientists but
by retired generals, police officers and political appointees.
Dadan Hindayana, the agency’s head, is an entomologist whose academic focus was insect protein, not child nutrition. Lodewyk Pusung and Sarwono, both retired army officers, occupy vice and secretary posts. Jimmy Alexander Adirman and Suardi Samiran, also from military backgrounds, manage inspection and operational divisions. Brigadier General Sony Sonjaya comes from the police. Political appointee Nanik S. Deyang, better known as a journalist and activist, was parachuted in as deputy. Few of these figures possess formal training in nutrition, child health, or food safety. Small wonder inspection regimes are perfunctory and that unsafe meals continue to reach schools unchecked.
And there is Bulog, the state logistics company tasked with
distributing staples for the program. Once designed to guarantee food security, Bulog has long since been captured by politics. Its warehouses overflow with imported rice, yet it routinely struggles to distribute staples efficiently. Allegations of mark-ups, procurement fraud and logistical inefficiency are perennial. Appointments at the
top rarely go to logistics experts. Instead, they are given to figures
with political ties or military service records.
Retired generals, former intelligence chiefs, and political allies populate Bulog’s board, mirroring the dysfunction seen across Indonesia’s state-owned enterprises. Audits confirm the scale of leakage. A leakage rate of around 15 percent has been estimated in state-run rice distribution schemes, reflecting diversion, spoilage and fraud. In 2025 alone, the Supreme Audit Agency uncovered multi-trillion in state losses linked to Bulog. Between 2014 and May 2025, the Corruption Eradication Commission prosecuted 310 corruption cases tied to public programmes, totaling Rp 25.1 trillion in losses.
The free meal scheme is simply the newest, and perhaps most expensive, channel for this drain.
The pattern runs deeper than BGN or Bulog. Across Indonesia,
state-owned enterprises have become a banqueting hall for political allies. Deputy ministers, party loyalists and confidants of the palace are routinely appointed as commissioners across the state sector, receiving stipends worth hundreds of millions of rupiah per month for little tangible work.
Pertamina, Indonesia’s energy crown jewel, provides a striking
example. Its Board of Commissioners is dominated by political insiders and retired generals: Mochamad Iriawan, a retired police general, serves as President Commissioner. Bambang Suswantono, a Marine Corps
general, sits alongside him. Dony Oskaria, the Deputy Minister of
SOEs, holds the Deputy President Commissioner post. Hasan Nasbi, a
former presidential communications aide, joined the board in 2025.
These appointments reward loyalty, not expertise. Pertamina loses out on seasoned energy executives capable of steering it through the global energy transition. Meanwhile, insiders collect monthly honoraria worth hundreds of millions.
The free meal programme is no aberration but the culmination of this pattern. If Pertamina shows how commissioner seats are handed out like gifts, the meal scheme shows how procurement contracts are funnelled to the connected. Provincial suppliers are picked less for capacity than for connections, local governments scramble for their slice of the budgetary pie, and oversight is minimal. In Central Java, a Rp 40
billion catering tender went to a firm owned by relatives of a
regional council member. In East Kalimantan, transport contracts
landed with companies tied to a police foundation. Each leak in the
pipeline means fewer rupiah reach classrooms.
Meanwhile, the human cost grows. Indonesia’s malnutrition crisis
remains acute: nearly 22 percent of children under five are stunted, one of the highest rates in Southeast Asia, according to UNICEF. Yet no serious nutritionists were brought in to design menus; no systemic
investment was made in school canteens, refrigeration or safe water.
Instead, boxed rice, eggs and fried chicken are dumped into classrooms without storage facilities.
Teachers and parents, already sceptical, have become unwilling
accomplices to a national-scale experiment in inefficiency.
Supporters claim the scheme boosts farmers by guaranteeing demand for local produce. But here too the evidence falls apart. Rice imports rose sharply in 2024 despite the programme’s promises of domestic absorption. Soybean and corn imports also rose. Farmers in Indramayu and Banyuwangi complain that procurement prices remain below market rates, while Bulog imports undercut their harvests. Far from
empowering the countryside, the scheme entrenches dependence on
imports and rewards politically connected traders.
Indonesia has faced parasitism before. In the 1990s, Suharto’s family and cronies fattened themselves on monopolies, contracts and state projects. Reformasi promised to end this, but the parasites adapted,
embedding themselves in boards, agencies and new populist programs dressed up as benevolence. The costs are not abstract. They are born in classrooms where students fall sick, in balance sheets where
trillions are squandered, and in lost futures where talent is sidelined by loyalty. Unless the nation cuts off its parasites, it will continue to be bled dry, one free meal at a time.
The tragedy is that Indonesia’s children deserve better. Instead of
reckless spending on a program designed by amateurs and guarded by soldiers, the country should be investing in safe water, school health infrastructure, and long-term industrial policies to create jobs and raise incomes.
A genuine nutrition programme would require professional oversight, scientific design, and grassroots involvement of schools, teachers, parents and health workers. It would prioritise fresh local produce, safe preparation facilities, and measurable outcomes in reducing stunting. It would not hand out contracts like candy to politically connected firms.
Yet for now, the parasites continue to thrive, feeding on a programme
that was supposed to feed the people. The President insists the free meal programme will secure his legacy. In reality, it secures only the entrenchment of a political class that dines well at the nation’s
expense, while Indonesia’s children are left with food poisoning and empty promises.
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Omong-Omong Media’s editorial is also published in The Jakarta Post every Monday.
