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View all search resultsThe politics of cash display in nation running out of forests
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.
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President Prabowo Subianto (left) watches as Attorney General ST Burhanuddin (second left) symbolically hands over funds on Dec. 24, 2025, collected from forestry administrative fines and recovered state assets from corruption cases to Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa (second right) and Forestry Minister Raja Juli Antoni (right) at the Attorney General’s Office complex in Jakarta. (Antara/Aditya Pradana Putra)
I
t was political theater on Dec. 24 when President Prabowo Subianto delivered a speech flanked by walls of 100,000-rupiah notes worth Rp 6.6 trillion (US$394.1 million). 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 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.
Why was this money displayed, in cash, in such a vulgar way? Did corporations and corrupters 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. Some questioned whether this performance was designed to divert attention from mounting criticism of Prabowo’s failure to respond to the disasters in Sumatra. Others wondered whether the cash itself was merely borrowed for this carefully staged display, a prop rather than proof.
Indonesia Corruption Watch quickly pointed out that, however impressive the walls of cash might look, they represent only a tiny fraction of the estimated Rp 300 trillion the state loses to corruption each year. The display underscores the government’s failure to recover most of the stolen money.
But this, in fact, is the governing style perfected first by former president Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and now inherited and exaggerated by Prabowo: 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.
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.
