If a child somewhere in Nusa Tenggara takes his own life for not being able to buy a pencil and notebook worth 10,000 rupiah (60 US cents) because their parents are so poor, while Danantara, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, concentrates trillions of rupiah and now announces plans to buy stocks, further enriching Indonesia’s wealthiest families, then this nation has truly lost its way.
The tragedy is not only that a ten-year-old fourth grader in East Nusa Tenggara felt so desperate that he ended his own life because his parents could not afford school supplies costing less than sixty US cents. The deeper tragedy is that this despair exposes a brutal paradox: even in the most isolated, impoverished, and neglected corners of Indonesia, children still cling to hope. They still want to learn, to be smart and to progress. It is the state that breaks them every time.
In this condition, one must ask: who really needs free meals (MBG), Mr. President?
The child did not starve. He was not demanding luxury. He was not asking for gadgets, fashionable clothes, or entertainment. He only wanted the simplest tools for learning. His death is therefore not about hunger, but about dignity. About opportunity. About a system that has systematically stripped hope from the poorest while lavishing financial privilege on the richest.
And this is where Danantara enters the moral frame.
When Pandu Sjahrir recently announced that Danantara would begin buying stocks at the Jakarta Exchange, it was presented as a technocratic and sophisticated strategy: smart asset management, portfolio diversification, wealth optimization. It sounds rational, efficient, and progressive. But placed beside the suicide of a ten-year-old child over a pencil, this strategy becomes morally obscene.
Because the fundamental question is not whether the state can make money, but for whom does the state exist?
Danantara’s creation was justified as a way to consolidate national assets, strengthen state capital, and generate sustainable revenue for development. Yet, instead of channeling these colossal funds directly into public services, especially education, healthcare, nutrition, rural infrastructure, teacher salaries, scholarships, school equipment, sanitation, the state chooses to play in capital markets. It chooses speculation over social investment. This is financialization, not development.
The term “casino state” describes a mode of governance in which the state increasingly behaves like a speculative investor rather than a guarantor of social rights. Public wealth is mobilised not primarily to expand public services, build productive capacity, or reduce inequality, but to chase financial returns through markets. Like a casino, this system is driven by risk-taking, volatility, and the illusion of rational control, while the real costs of failure are quietly transferred to society.
In such a system, financial success becomes the dominant indicator of national progress, while human wellbeing is reduced to secondary status. What matters is not whether people live better, but whether portfolios grow faster.
Under this logic, children in remote villages are no longer citizens with rights. They become invisible collateral damage. The poor are no longer subjects of development. They are statistical noise.
Stock markets, by their very structure, reward those who already own capital. When Danantara injects trillions into equities, the immediate beneficiaries are large shareholders, financial conglomerates, and corporate elites: Indonesia’s wealthiest families and institutional investors. Gains accumulate at the top. Risk and volatility are socialised downward. The result is not shared prosperity, but accelerated inequality.
Indonesia already suffers from extreme wealth concentration. According to multiple international studies, the richest one percent control a staggering share of national wealth, while tens of millions live on the edge of poverty. In this landscape, directing public capital into stock markets is not neutral policy but a class warfare by technocratic means.
And this is happening amid alarming signs of state decay.
Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perception Index (2025) reveals that Indonesia’s score has fallen by four points to 34, dropping its rank to 109, now comparable with Laos and African states such as Sierra Leone, Malawi, and Algeria. This collapse reflects systematic erosion of accountability, legal integrity, and institutional independence. Corruption is no longer an anomaly. It has become governance.
At the same time, Indonesia’s budget deficit is approaching the legal ceiling of three percent, limiting fiscal space for social spending. Major rating agencies have downgraded Indonesian state banks, and accordingly the country risk as a whole, raising concerns about systemic risk, capital adequacy, and long-term stability.
Yet instead of consolidating domestic welfare and restoring public trust, the government doubles down on spectacle.
Prabowo Subianto announces readiness to deploy 8,000 troops to Gaza, a grand geopolitical gesture with enormous logistical, diplomatic, and financial implications. Simultaneously, Indonesia signals willingness to contribute one billion US dollars to Donald Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace,” a nebulous international vanity project lacking institutional clarity or democratic oversight. This is a global posturing while children die for lack of pencils.
This grotesque contrast reveals the core pathology of Indonesia’s ruling ideology: visibility over viability, symbolism over substance, optics over outcomes. Massive funds are made available when international prestige, political theatrics, and elite networking are at stake. But when a rural child needs a notebook, the treasury is suddenly empty.
Defenders of Danantara argue that stock investments will grow state wealth, enabling larger social spending later. But this trickle-down logic has been repeatedly discredited. Financial gains do not automatically translate into welfare. They first circulate among financial elites, corporate boards, and investment vehicles. Redistribution, when it occurs, is marginal, delayed, and often politically manipulated.
Meanwhile, immediate suffering is postponed indefinitely. Why must a child wait for portfolio performance? Why should survival depend on market cycles? Why must education be subjected to speculative finance?
A state that truly prioritizes development would invert this logic. It would invest massively and directly in human capability. It would treat education not as expenditure but as national survival infrastructure. It would flood the poorest regions with teachers, books, digital access, scholarships, transport, nutrition, and safe schools.
For the cost of one financial bailout, millions of Indonesian children could receive complete educational support. For the cost of one geopolitical vanity project, entire provinces could be transformed. But this would require a state that values human life more than financial prestige.
The suicide of this ten-year-old child is not an isolated tragedy. It is a structural indictment: Indonesia does not suffer from lack of resources. It suffers from catastrophic misallocation of wealth.
The government boasts of free meal programs feeding millions. But what does feeding mean if children have no books? What does nutrition matter if education is structurally denied? What does survival mean if dignity is stripped away?
A child does not kill himself because he is hungry. He kills himself because he feels worthless, trapped, hopeless. And that hopelessness is socially produced. It is produced by a system that glorifies markets but neglects humanity, that worships growth but ignores justice, that celebrates billionaires while abandoning villages.
In such a system, free meals become a smokescreen, a shallow technocratic fix that avoids deeper structural reform. They pacify bodies but do not liberate minds. They fill stomachs but starve futures. True social policy would start not with food, but with empowerment: books, schools, teachers, critical thinking, digital access, and cultural capital.
Danantara, in theory, could become a transformative institution, channeling national assets into long-term human development, ecological regeneration, rural transformation, and industrial upgrading. It could fund schools, universities, research, innovation hubs, cooperatives, green energy, and creative industries. It could be a vehicle for democratic economic restructuring. Instead, it is being shaped as a speculative investment machine.
A casino state does not build nations. It builds bubbles. And bubbles always burst. When they do, it will not be billionaires who suffer first. It will be children like the boy in Nusa Tenggara, children whose lives are already hanging by threads.
This is the true obscenity of Indonesia’s current trajectory. It is not corruption alone. It is not authoritarian drift alone. It is not elite capture alone. It is the systematic inversion of moral priorities.
A nation that allows its children to die for lack of pencils while funneling trillions into speculative finance has lost its ethical compass. It has replaced social justice with financial fetishism. It has mistaken wealth accumulation for progress. And in doing so, it has betrayed its most sacred duty: to protect its children.
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Omong-Omong Media’s editorial is also published in The Jakarta Post every Monday.
