The Courage to Build Indonesia Emas 2045
By Sachin V. Gopalan, CEO Indonesia Economic Forum
History has a curious habit of rewriting first impressions.
The national programs we now celebrate as milestones of development were rarely greeted with universal enthusiasm when they began. More often than not, they arrived amid skepticism, political opposition and relentless scrutiny. Newspapers highlighted early failures. Bureaucracies struggled to adapt. Budgets exceeded expectations. Citizens questioned whether the promises justified the disruption. To those living through the moment, success often appeared distant and uncertain.
Turning Points
Only with the benefit of hindsight do these same initiatives come to be seen as turning points.
Singapore’s public housing program transformed a nation where overcrowded settlements once dominated the urban landscape. Today, its Housing and Development Board is regarded as one of the world’s most successful public housing institutions. Yet in its early years, compulsory land acquisition, rapid urban redevelopment and the enormous financial commitment drew criticism from those who questioned both the pace and scale of the government’s ambitions.
India offers another compelling example. Programs such as Aadhaar, the Unified Payments Interface, the Goods and Services Tax, Jan Dhan financial inclusion and the Mid-Day Meal Scheme all faced concerns ranging from administrative complexity and implementation failures to questions about cost and governance. Today, Aadhaar has become the world’s largest digital identity platform, UPI is a global reference point in instant payments, and India’s broader Digital Public Infrastructure is increasingly studied as a model for inclusive digital development. None of these initiatives succeeded because they were flawless at launch. They succeeded because governments kept improving them while remaining committed to the larger objective.
Indonesia’s own experience tells a similar story. BPJS Kesehatan faced operational difficulties and funding concerns in its formative years. QRIS required banks, merchants and consumers to adapt to a new payment ecosystem. Major toll road developments attracted questions about costs and priorities. Even decentralization after Reformasi was once viewed as an ambitious and uncertain experiment. Few would now argue that these initiatives should never have been attempted. They became part of Indonesia’s institutional landscape because they were refined through years of implementation, investment and learning.
Flagship Programs
It is against this historical backdrop that President Prabowo Subianto’s flagship programs deserve to be evaluated. The Free Nutritious Meals program, Makan Bergizi Gratis or MBG, Koperasi Merah Putih, Danantara and a wider range of national initiatives represent an unusually ambitious effort to reshape Indonesia’s development trajectory. Nutrition, food security, village-based economic empowerment, strategic investment, industrialization and infrastructure are not short-term political projects. They are generational investments intended to strengthen the foundations of Indonesia Emas 2045.
The scale of this problem-solving agenda is easy to overlook amid the daily political debate. The recently published book Problem Solver, written by Dirgayuza Setiawan, Muhammad Qodari and Agung Gumilar Saputra, identifies 108 national challenges that its authors say were addressed during President Prabowo’s first 18 months in office, spanning food, energy, health, education, infrastructure, poverty reduction, industrialization, governance, digitalization, defense and diplomacy.
Individual policies can—and should—be debated. Not every intervention will work exactly as intended, and some will undoubtedly require substantial correction. But taken together, they reveal an administration attempting structural intervention across an unusually broad range of national challenges. That ambition naturally attracts intense public attention.
When programs operate at national scale, even relatively small implementation failures become highly visible. A logistics breakdown affecting one region, delays in procurement, inconsistencies in local execution or governance concerns can quickly dominate headlines and shape public perception. In today’s digital media environment, early setbacks often receive far greater attention than the millions of meals, transactions or services delivered successfully each day.
Large Reforms Expose Complexity
This should not surprise us. Large reforms inevitably expose the complexity of governing a nation of more than 280 million people spread across thousands of islands. No pilot project can fully simulate nationwide implementation. The true test of leadership therefore lies not in avoiding every operational challenge, but in responding to those challenges quickly, transparently and with a willingness to improve.
That distinction is important. Criticism plays an essential role in a healthy democracy. Public scrutiny strengthens institutions, identifies weaknesses and holds governments accountable. Constructive criticism should therefore be welcomed rather than dismissed. But criticism serves the nation best when it distinguishes between flaws in implementation and flaws in vision. Improving delivery is very different from abandoning the objective altogether.
Consider MBG. Few would dispute the importance of improving child nutrition, reducing stunting and investing in healthier future generations. Nutrition during childhood affects educational outcomes, workforce productivity and long-term economic potential. Countries that invested early in child nutrition did not merely improve public health; they strengthened their future human capital.
Indonesia is attempting something similar on an extraordinary scale. The challenge is therefore not whether the objective is worthwhile, but whether implementation can continue improving as the program expands. Better logistics, stronger quality assurance, more effective monitoring and closer coordination between central and local governments are not arguments against MBG. They are precisely what will determine whether it succeeds.
At the same time, MBG should not be viewed only as a social welfare program. At sufficient scale, feeding millions of Indonesians can create demand across agriculture, dairy, livestock, fisheries, food processing, logistics and village enterprise. Indonesia still imports approximately 80 percent of its national milk requirements, while the government has set a target to increase domestic milk production by 900,000 tons by 2029 through breeding-stock imports and investment support.
If that connection between nutrition and domestic production is managed well, MBG could create a virtuous circle: improving human capital while stimulating investment, rural employment and local supply chains.
Enormous Ambition
The same principle applies to Koperasi Merah Putih. Cooperative movements around the world have played an important role in building inclusive economies. India’s Amul transformed millions of small dairy farmers into participants in one of the world’s largest dairy cooperatives. New Zealand’s Fonterra became a global agricultural powerhouse through cooperative ownership. Spain’s Mondragón showed that worker-owned enterprises could compete internationally while preserving strong community roots.
Indonesia’s ambition is enormous. The establishment of 83,371 Red and White Village Cooperatives gives a sense of the scale. By April 2026, 5,000 outlets had been built, with 30,000 targeted for completion by August.
Numbers of that magnitude should themselves put implementation challenges into perspective. Building a few hundred successful cooperatives is one thing. Attempting to create an economic institution reaching tens of thousands of communities across the archipelago is something entirely different.
The significance of Koperasi Merah Putih may ultimately lie less in the number of cooperatives established than in the bottlenecks they can help remove. Fertilizer distribution offers an instructive example. A system previously governed by 145 regulations—including 23 Government Regulations and six Presidential Regulations—was simplified into a single Presidential Regulation intended to enable more direct distribution from Pupuk Indonesia to retailers and farmers.
Coordination & Decision Making
This illustrates an important point about reform. Bold government does not always mean creating bigger government. Sometimes transformation comes from doing the opposite: simplifying bureaucracy, removing regulations that obstruct delivery, forcing institutions to coordinate and finally making decisions that have been postponed for years.
Some early agricultural indicators are also noteworthy. The combination of higher government purchasing prices for rice, irrigation support and fertilizer reform was associated with the Farmer’s Welfare Index reaching around 125 in 2026, described in the book as its highest level in 34 years. Government rice reserves were also reported to have reached 5 million tons in April 2026, the highest level in Indonesia’s history.
These are the kinds of outcomes by which ambitious programs should eventually be judged—not merely by the announcements surrounding their launch, but by whether they measurably improve national resilience and people’s livelihoods.
The same philosophy extends to fisheries. The government’s plan to procure 4,582 modern fishing vessels targets approximately 2.3 million tons of fish annually, could utilize around 30 domestic shipyards and potentially generate 600,000 jobs.
Whether every target is eventually achieved remains to be seen. But this is precisely the scale of thinking implied by the phrase nation building: solving a problem in fisheries while simultaneously strengthening shipbuilding, employment, food security, exports and coastal economies.
Problem Solving
Danantara should perhaps be viewed through a similarly long-term lens. Virtually every successful sovereign investment institution—from Singapore’s Temasek and GIC to Malaysia’s Khazanah Nasional and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala—required years to build governance frameworks, public confidence and investment discipline. None emerged overnight as globally respected institutions. Their credibility was earned through professional management, transparency and consistent performance over time.
Indonesia’s own sovereign investment ambitions should be judged by the same standard. The objective should not be perfection in the first year, but steady institutional maturation supported by strong governance, independent oversight and long-term accountability.
More importantly, Danantara’s relevance should ultimately be measured not simply by the size of the assets it manages, but by whether those assets help solve strategic economic problems. The plans to expand domestic milk production and modernize livestock production illustrate the potential role of national investment capital in reducing import dependence and strengthening domestic productive capacity.
That distinction matters. Nation building is not simply about spending more money. It is about solving problems.
Sometimes that requires creating an institution. Sometimes it requires infrastructure. Sometimes it requires deploying capital at enormous scale. But sometimes it requires something far less dramatic: changing a regulation, removing a bottleneck, connecting institutions that previously operated in silos or empowering someone to finally make a decision.
Ultimately, therefore, the conversation should not revolve around whether ambitious reforms encounter difficulties. History suggests they almost always do. The more meaningful question is whether governments demonstrate the discipline to learn, adapt and improve without losing sight of the larger objective. And this is where supporters of ambitious programs must accept an equally important principle: time cannot become an excuse for poor performance.
Giving transformative programs time to mature does not mean giving them immunity from scrutiny. Quite the opposite. The larger the ambition and the greater the public resources involved, the stronger the requirements should be for transparency, measurable outcomes, professional management and accountability.
The proper response to implementation failure is therefore neither reflexive condemnation nor unquestioning defense. It is correction. If food-safety systems in MBG are inadequate, strengthen them. If a cooperative is poorly managed, fix its governance. If an investment institution lacks sufficient transparency, demand greater transparency. If bureaucracy prevents farmers from receiving fertilizer, simplify the bureaucracy. If a policy creates unintended consequences, change it.
Move Fast and Fix Things
The courage to build must be accompanied by the courage to correct.
As Indonesia moves toward Indonesia Emas 2045, the country will need more than incremental improvements. It will require bold investments in human capital, stronger institutions, modern infrastructure, technological capability, food and energy security, industrial capacity and economic inclusion. These transformations inevitably demand political courage because their greatest benefits are often realized years—or even decades—after they are first conceived.
Perhaps that is the paradox of nation building. Leaders who think furthest into the future often receive the strongest criticism in the present. Their programs are judged before they have had sufficient time to mature, while their successes become visible only after institutions have evolved, systems have improved and generations have benefited from decisions made years earlier.
But history rarely rewards governments simply for announcing ambitious ideas. It rewards those that convert ambition into institutions, institutions into execution and execution into measurable improvements in people’s lives. It rewards governments that remain committed to difficult reforms while accepting constructive criticism with humility, correcting mistakes quickly and refining policies with discipline.
That is ultimately the standard by which today’s ambitious reforms should be judged. Not whether every solution was perfect when it began. Not whether every target was achieved immediately. But whether Indonesia became stronger because somebody had the courage to confront problems that had been accepted for too long as simply too difficult to solve.
Indonesia Emas 2045 will not be built through perfect programs. It will be built through the courage to pursue ambitious ideas, the discipline to measure their results, the humility to correct their weaknesses and the collective patience to recognize that nation building is measured not in political news cycles, but in generations.