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| By Laksamana Sukardi |
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, President Prabowo Subianto presented Indonesia through a striking—and unsettling—juxtaposition. In one breath, he spoke of citizens so poor they survive on little more than rice and salt. In the next, he confidently outlined Danantara, a sovereign wealth fund envisioned on a scale associated with advanced economies—hundreds of billions of dollars, potentially approaching a trillion.
The contrast was almost certainly deliberate. But it invites a question that rhetoric alone cannot resolve: is it normal—or defensible—for a state that claims the capacity to manage wealth on such a scale to still tolerate deprivation at its most elemental level?
Development theory offers little comfort here. Classical public finance has long argued that state capacity is ultimately judged not by how much capital a government can accumulate, but by how effectively it converts resources into social welfare (Musgrave, 1959). Amartya Sen later refined this argument, insisting that development is meaningful only insofar as it expands human capabilities and freedoms—not balance sheets (Sen, 1999).
History reinforces this point.
Norway, the canonical model of sovereign wealth governance, did not construct its trillion-dollar fund as a ladder out of mass poverty. The Government Pension Fund Global was established after broad-based prosperity and a robust welfare state were already in place. Its purpose was intergenerational equity and fiscal discipline, not redistribution by proxy (Mehlum, Moene & Torvik, 2006).
The Gulf monarchies followed a different path, accumulating sovereign wealth earlier in their development. Yet even there, state wealth was paired with immediate and visible social provisioning—subsidies, housing, guaranteed employment—reflecting a political reality in which extreme deprivation among citizens was neither acceptable nor sustainable (Beblawi, 1987).
Malaysia offers a closer and more relevant comparison. Khazanah Nasional was created while Malaysia was still a middle-income country grappling with inequality. Crucially, it was embedded within a broader developmental-state framework: industrial upgrading, redistribution, and social mobility were explicit policy objectives, not incidental outcomes. The legitimacy of state capital rested on its demonstrable transmission into society (Jomo, 2004; Gomez et al., 2018).
Indonesia today fits uneasily into none of these categories. It is not a wealthy society preserving surplus, nor a rentier state underwriting welfare by decree. It is a democracy with growing institutional ambition and persistent, structural deprivation. That combination is not merely uncomfortable—it is analytically anomalous.
President Prabowo’s narrative appears to rely on a logic of sequencing: endure hardship now, build financial institutions first, and justice will follow. Danantara, in this framing, becomes the engine of future equity. Poverty is invoked as moral context; sovereign wealth as technocratic solution.
Development history, however, offers a sobering warning. States can become highly proficient at capital accumulation while remaining ineffective—or unwilling—at distribution. Financial sophistication does not automatically reduce poverty; in weakly accountable systems, it often coexists with inequality and can entrench elite capture (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012; Piketty, 2014).
This is the unspoken risk embedded in the Davos speech. When a government can credibly speak the language of trillion-dollar finance while simultaneously invoking hunger as moral currency, questions inevitably arise about priorities and power. Is sovereign wealth being built to transform society—or to signal membership in the global club of capital-managing states?
Davos audiences, fluent in the grammar of markets, are unlikely to be persuaded by ambition alone. They will look instead for institutional guarantees: transparency, accountability, and a demonstrable causal link between national wealth and social outcomes. Absent these, the image of rice and salt does not humanize the narrative—it indicts it.
As Sen famously argued, development is not measured by the expansion of financial assets, but by the removal of the “unfreedoms” that prevent people from living lives of dignity. By that standard, Indonesia’s ascent will not be judged by the size of Danantara’s assets under management, but by whether the country can make a more demanding and credible claim: that no citizen’s dignity is deferred to a future accounting period.
Until that link is made explicit and enforceable, the tension remains unresolved—a trillion-dollar dream standing uneasily beside an empty plate.
January 25, 2026
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