The design of the free nutritious meal program was flawed from the outset. It is a feeding frenzy for elites and cronies.
WHILE the government’s free nutritious meal (MBG) program has become a debacle from top to bottom, its design was flawed from the start. This populist project lacked prior studies and planning, and lacks adequate evaluation and oversight. Everything has fallen apart in the implementation phase. This embodiment of Prabowo Subianto’s campaign promises in the 2024 presidential election has become nothing short of a feeding frenzy for his family and friends.
The arrest of the former Chief of the National Nutrition Agency (BGN), Dadan Hindayana, along with his two deputies, Lodewyk Pusung and Sony Sonjaya, by the Attorney General’s Office is merely the tip of a chaotic iceberg.
The operations of the BGN have long raised suspicions. One example is the procurement of electric motorcycles, shoes, tablets, and televisions, something unrelated to child nutrition. Prosecutors found they interfered with commitment-making officials and then inflated procurement budgets, with the illicit markups allegedly lining their own pockets.
With no transparent selection processes, they appointed foundations suspected of being affiliated with BGN officials or employees as partners for Nutrition Fulfillment Service Units (SPPG). Unqualified foundations easily slipped through because the three officials rigged the verification process on BGN’s official portal. Several of these foundations belonged to the officials themselves. The incentives flowing into these foundations reached billions of rupiah every single day.
The chaos actually predated the formal establishment of the BGN. This magazine discovered that shortly after being declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election, Prabowo—then the Defense Minister in Joko Widodo’s administration—ordered his subordinates to realize his political aspirations and ambitions. This was done despite the fact that the MBG budget was not yet available. Initial funding was secured through loans from close associates. Prabowo personally contributed Rp110 billion to build kitchens across 72 locations. The repayment of these loans has now stalled. This is where the governance nightmare began.
There are blatant conflicts of interest within BGN. This magazine’s investigation in April 2025 revealed that several partners appointed by the BGN were supporters of Prabowo and members of the Gerindra Party in the 2024 General Elections. One of these was the National Solidarity Movement Foundation (GSN), which runs kitchens in Mampang Prapatan, South Jakarta, and Depok, West Java. Prabowo is the founder and patron of this foundation. Meanwhile, Nanik Sudaryati Deyang, the newly appointed BGN Chief, sits as the foundation’s deputy chair. After these revelations came to light, GSN stopped operating kitchens.
Rather than making improvements, the implementation of the free nutritious meal program has become increasingly haphazard. By the end of 2025, according to mapping done by Indonesia Corruption Watch, of the 102 partner foundations investigated in 38 provinces, 28 were affiliated with political parties, 12 linked to government bureaucracy, six had ties to the military, and three were led by individuals previously implicated in corruption cases. The elites have hijacked state resources and channeled them into the pockets of the ruling elite’s patronage networks.
It is hard not to conclude that the free nutritious meal program, which swallowed a staggering Rp268 trillion budget this year, was deliberately designed to consolidate support networks, distribute rents to cronies, and polish the image of the Prabowo administration. The larger the allocated budget, the grander the spoils available for rent-seeking.
Bad policies arise not merely out of negligence or mismanagement, but because specific interests are intentionally injected to benefit certain groups or maintain power. To quote Michael Howlett, Ching Leong, and Tim Legrand in Bad Public Policy published by Cambridge University Press, this is a textbook example of malevolent policy design: bad intention behind a policy formulation.
Such malevolent intent can be seen in a policy design that ignores future uncertainties. Coordination and accountability are deliberately weakened, opening opportunities for abuse. While the social costs are shifted to the public, the benefits are concentrated among the elites and their cronies. These characteristics are evident in the MBG program.
Meanwhile, on the ground, children are becoming its victims. As of April 2026, 33,626 students have been poisoned. Nutritional standards are being ignored in the free nutritious meal program. This project, which claimed to be aimed at combating stunting, is actually producing a health crisis.
Prabowo must stop the MBG program, as it is clearly in shambles. Replacing Dadan Hindayana with Nanik S. Deyang as the Chief of the National Nutrition Agency is not the solution. Unless there is a fundamental overhaul of the free nutritious meal program’s design, corruption will not stop. It will seep in through the same cracks, just with different faces.
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