It was a spectacular show of trickery and cosmetic political theater when on Wednesday President Prabowo Subianto delivered a speech flanked by walls of 100,000-rupiah notes worth IDR 6.6 trillion. The walls of money were so massive they spilled across the hall of the Attorney General’s Office in Jakarta. The money was said to come from recovered corrupt assets and fines imposed on companies guilty of illegal deforestation.
Prabowo praised his Attorney General and other law-enforcement bodies, institutions recently ranked among the most corrupt and least trusted in the country, as heroic forces standing on the side of good, battling the evil forces intent on ruining the nation.
Questions arose almost immediately, met with scorn and mockery across social media: why was this money displayed in cash, in such a vulgar way? Did corporations and corruptors really pay their fines in banknotes? Did corporations really arrive at state offices with truckloads of banknotes like repentant gangsters in a low-budget crime film? Or was this simply another piece of political stagecraft? Social media answered with laughter, sarcasm, and anger.
If crimes have been committed, why display the cash instead of naming the perpetrators? Why not bring them to justice?
Some questioned whether this performance was designed to divert attention from mounting criticism of Prabowo’s failure to respond to the disasters in Sumatra, which have killed more than 1,000 people and affected millions more, while vast areas remain cut off. Others wondered whether the cash itself was merely borrowed for this carefully staged display, a prop rather than proof.
While Prabowo appeared to treat the spectacle as one of his signature achievements, Indonesia Corruption Watch quickly pointed out that, however impressive the walls of cash might look, they represent only a tiny fraction of the estimated IDR 300 trillion the state loses to corruption each year. Far from a success, the display instead underscores the government’s failure to recover most of the stolen money.
But this, in fact, is the governing style perfected first by Joko Widodo and now inherited and exaggerated by Prabowo Subianto: politics as illusion, morality as choreography, governance as a carefully staged magic trick designed to distract from people from reality, and from who is really being robbed.
It was hard not to admire the symbolism. Here was the state, finally acknowledging corruption and environmental crime, only to turn accountability into a circus prop. The stacks of cash were meant to signify victory over wrongdoing. Instead, they resembled ransom money paid by reality to power in exchange for silence. The message was not justice has been done, but look over here.
This is how Indonesia is governed now: by spectacle so crude it dares the public to object, by narratives so inflated they collapse under their own weight, by numbers waved around like talismans against doubt. In this performance, corruption is no longer a structural problem but a villain of the week, conveniently defeated on stage, while the system that enables it carries on untouched behind the curtains.
Indonesia’s leaders like to speak in numbers. Growth above five percent. Poverty below nine percent. Trillions recovered. Millions lifted. These figures are recited with the confidence of a magic spell. Say them often enough, and suffering disappears.
But numbers can lie without being false. Indonesia’s poverty line is set so low that mere survival counts as success. Millions who cannot afford nutritious food, secure housing, healthcare, or education are officially no longer poor. They are statistically invisible, which is cheaper than helping them. By international standards appropriate for a country aspiring to upper-middle-income status, a majority of Indonesians live precariously close to poverty. This is not a failure of measurement. It is a choice.
Inequality, too, is presented as a problem already solved. The Gini ratio inches down by decimals and is declared tamed. Meanwhile, wealth concentrates at the top with almost gravitational certainty. A small elite captures land, capital, concessions, and influence, while nearly half of all workers survive on minimum wages that barely cover food and transport. The middle class, once paraded as proof of Indonesia’s success, shrinks quietly, demoted into informal work, debt, and anxiety.
This economic fragility is not an accident. It is the direct outcome of a development model that treats labour as expendable, welfare as optional, and nature as collateral damage. Growth is pursued not by building human capability, but by extracting value in fast and cheap way, and often violently, from land and people.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in Indonesia’s forests. Illegal deforestation is punished theatrically, as in the cash-wall spectacle, while legal deforestation proceeds with bureaucratic efficiency. Forests fall, peatlands burn, rivers are poisoned, and indigenous territories are erased, not because the law is absent, but because it has been carefully designed to look away.
The floods and landslides that have killed people in Sumatra are described as natural disasters, as if rain were an unforeseeable act of God rather than a known consequence of stripped hillsides and broken watersheds. This linguistic trick is essential. Calling them natural absolves policy. It transforms responsibility into fate.
But there is nothing natural about a development model that clears forests faster than it can protect human life. There is nothing inevitable about communities being buried alive so that quarterly profits can be reported elsewhere. These disasters are not interruptions to Indonesia’s growth story. They are its logical conclusion.
Environmental destruction does not strike evenly. It follows class lines with brutal precision. Indigenous peoples lose ancestral lands that sustained them for generations. Farmers lose soil and water. Fisherfolk lose mangroves and fish stocks. The urban poor absorb the consequences through rising food prices, polluted air, and forced migration. Meanwhile, those who benefit most from extraction live far from floodplains, protected by capital, connections, and indifference.
And when the damage becomes impossible to ignore, the state arrives not with prevention, but with performance. A speech. A backdrop. A stack of banknotes. Justice, presented as cash, as if the problem were a lack of money rather than a surplus of impunity.
The same law-enforcement institutions praised on stage for fighting corruption are widely distrusted by the public. The same state that fines companies for illegal deforestation continues to issue permits, weaken environmental safeguards, and criminalize those who resist extraction. Accountability is selective, retrospective, and theatrical. Structural reform is absent.
Even as Prabowo speaks of fining and punishing perpetrators of deforestation, vast tracts of forests in Papua are being cleared, destroyed and converted into plantation with the explicit permission of the government itself.
Indonesia’s economic defenders insist there is no alternative. Extractive industries, they say, are necessary for development. Infrastructure must come first. Redistribution can wait. Environmental protection is a luxury. Indigenous rights are complicated. These arguments are delivered with the calm authority of inevitability.
But what is inevitable is this: an economy that destroys its own ecological foundations will eventually destroy its fiscal, social, and political foundations as well. Disaster response costs rise. Health systems strain under pollution and displacement. Infrastructure collapses under floods it was never designed to survive. Public trust erodes as citizens realize the state can protect investment better than it can protect life.
As the world moves toward 2026, Indonesia’s timing could not be worse. Global markets are shifting toward carbon accountability. Trade regimes are beginning to penalize environmentally destructive production. Investors speak the language of ESG while quietly divesting from reputational risk. Indonesia risks locking itself into a model that is not only unjust, but obsolete.
Yet the response remains the same: more spectacle, more slogans, more numbers. The walls of cash are not meant to solve problems; they are meant to reassure those in power that appearance still works. That the audience will applaud. That the illusion holds.
But illusions decay. People living with floods, hunger, debt, and insecurity do not need better performances. They need land that does not disappear, rivers that do not kill, wages that allow them to live, and a state that treats survival as a right rather than a public-relations challenge.
Indonesia is not facing a temporary downturn or a communications problem. It is facing a crisis of logic. A system that measures success by GDP while erasing the conditions of life is not developing; it is dismantling itself. A politics that mistakes spectacle for justice is not governing; it is stalling for time.
The stacks of money behind President Prabowo were meant to symbolize strength. They revealed something else entirely: a state so reliant on theater because it no longer knows how to explain, let alone defend, the reality it has created.
And when politics becomes theater at this scale, it is usually because the truth, left unmasked, would be unbearable.
***
Omong-Omong Media’s editorial is also published in The Jakarta Post every week.
