The Adviser from the Dining Table

Notes from a Coffee Shop on an Advisory Seat Whose Vacancy Nobody Heard Of

On Friday morning, 23 October 2026, my coffee arrived alongside a document passing from phone to phone. At the next table a young man in a neat shirt was opening a plastic folder holding his original degree certificate and a few certified photocopies, preparing for a ten o'clock job interview. Meanwhile, on the screens of the other customers' phones, the talk of the shop was an attachment to a document titled Ministerial Decision Number 3 of 2026 on the Appointment of Expert Staff to the Minister of Hajj and Umrah. It listed nine names. Two of them, according to the circulating attachment, were Barbarossa Muhammad Farros in second place and Gibran Muhammad Fawwaz in seventh, said to be the minister's own sons. The decision, according to reports, was signed by the minister himself.

So that nobody is left confused, we should first introduce the minister. He is Mochamad Irfan Yusuf, better known as Gus Irfan. Born in Jombang, East Java, in 1962, he is the son of KH Yusuf Hasyim and grandson of the founder of Nahdlatul Ulama, KH Hasyim Asy'ari. Since 1989 he has served as general secretary of the Tebuireng Islamic boarding school, his family's pesantren, and he is also known as a politician of the Gerindra party. In October 2024 he was sworn in to head the Hajj Organising Agency, and on 8 September 2025 President Prabowo Subianto swore him in as Minister of Hajj and Umrah, the first in Indonesian history, when the agency was upgraded to a ministry. Such a record is no small matter, and that is precisely why the public expects so much.

Let us borrow this coffee shop to understand the matter. Imagine a large establishment called the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah, which handles the sacred journeys of millions of people who have saved for decades in order to go. Its owner naturally needs advisers, since a task so great cannot be shouldered alone. So the most capable and trustworthy people are sought. As far as the reports I have read go, the selection process and qualifications of those advisers have not been explained in detail to the public. And the adviser easiest to reach is the one living in the next room. Advice from the next room, as we know, seldom disagrees with the person advised, because the dinner table is the same.

Of course the minister has not stayed silent. In his explanation he said the number of advisers in his ministry remains below the permitted limit: of three allowances for special staff he took one, and of five for expert staff he took four. He also said the ministry was short of people when it was being set up, with some seven thousand staff needed, and that his children and students helped build the institution without being asked. Such an explanation deserves a fair hearing. One analyst who criticised him also acknowledged, according to reports, that no formal rule was clearly broken, and that what is at issue is ethics and the potential conflict of interest. Therein lies the irony. Not breaking the rules and being fitting are two phrases that do not often travel together. An unfilled quota does not mean members of the family may fill it. In any coffee shop, an empty chair is not an invitation for the owner's relatives to sit down, but an opportunity for someone else to be tested.

As for remuneration, there is an intriguing muddle. A widely circulated poster cites a monthly salary in the tens of millions of rupiah, together with an official car and fuel, whereas the minister, according to reports, says his two sons are not paid. Let the budget documents settle which is right, and let us hope they settle it in plain view. Satire has no need to add figures that remain untested. But even supposing there is no pay, the question does not go away. Reward does not always come in rupiah. An official decree is another kind of currency: it opens the door to meetings, grants access to information, and attaches a name to authority. A pure volunteer seldom needs the state's stamp in order to help. A stamp has a value of its own, and that value cannot always be counted in rupiah. Then there is a small question that the car park attendant outside would surely ask, and which cannot be answered with a smile. If it is true that they are unpaid, do those advisers pay for their own midday lunch packets and their journeys to and from the office, like volunteers who bring a packed lunch from home? Or are there other budget lines, with names like meal allowance, travel allowance and operating costs, that keep the phrase unpaid feeling comfortable? The coffee may well be free, but the cup, the sugar and the electricity still come from the shop's till. I do not know the answer myself, and have no wish to guess. Let the budget documents and the audit bodies answer, for the use money is not the owner's private money, but that of customers who have saved for decades.

At the tables of the shop, that morning's talk moved swiftly from the document to the faces. A motorcycle-taxi driver asked how many young people had come this week with plastic folders holding their original certificates, queued with pounding hearts, and been politely turned away because the seat they were after had already gone to someone better known. The young man at the next table glanced once more at his folder. He had his certificate, his transcript and a medical certificate. Nobody had ever asked him to bring a certificate proving he was somebody's son. Perhaps that is where the bitterness of this shop begins: not in the size of the post, but in the fact that the widest door so often opens for those who never need to knock.

And yet the business this establishment handles is no ordinary business. The funds and hopes of millions of prospective pilgrims, who have waited their turn for years, are entrusted to a ministry only newly born. Whoever manages a sacred journey ought to be the most careful in keeping family interests apart from the interests of the faithful. Not because his sons are certainly unqualified, but because public trust is built not on a belief that someone is capable, but on the ability to prove it before everyone. An official who appoints his own family and asks the public to trust that they are able is asking the public to pay in trust he has not yet had time to save.

The way out is simple, and need not wait for anyone to be angry. Open the selection of expert staff to all, publish the qualifications and the reasons, and let those who are truly capable, including the minister's sons if that is the case, prove themselves among the other applicants. If the aim is merely to help sincerely, they can carry on doing so as volunteers, without a decree. And if the decree is to be kept, show the basis of competence, the selection mechanism and a conflict-of-interest declaration the public can examine. Light seldom harms those who hide nothing, and so there should be no reason to fear the lamp.

I finished my coffee slowly. Outside, the young man in the neat shirt walked past with his plastic folder in hand, heading for a door that somehow never seemed to open wide for him. I watched him until he vanished round the bend. The bitterest coffee, I thought, is not the kind brewed too long, but the kind drunk while watching the important seats of this Indonesian country filled from the same dining table. And when the advisers are the very people who set the spoon on the owner's table, the people no longer ask who is the cleverest. They ask, in a voice that is quiet yet can no longer be stirred away, who actually has the right to ask. And probably the answer is: "I want it that way!"

Bahasa

Coffee and Corruption: When the Shop Only Counts the Envelopes Under the Table

Notes from a Coffee Shop on a Definition That Shrinks Like a Jumper Washed Too Hot

That morning my coffee arrived with a curious piece of news. In the corner of my regular coffee shop sat a retired gentleman, whose eyes were always sharper than any cashier's, frowning over his newspaper. There was talk, he said, of redefining corruption in Indonesia. No longer as anything that makes the public purse leak, but chiefly as the act of taking a bribe. The reference point was an international convention we have ratified, and the reasoning sounded courteous enough: those who run state investment bodies and state-owned enterprises should not be afraid to take business decisions that genuinely carry risk. I took a sip. The coffee tasted no different, yet somehow I felt as though the locks on this Indonesian country's kitchen had just been changed.

To make sense of the idea, let us borrow this very coffee shop. Imagine the owner employs a cashier and a buyer of supplies. Until now the rule has been simple: if the till runs short because the cashier abused his position, he answers for it, whether or not he pocketed an envelope from a supplier. The new proposal reads differently. The cashier is guilty only if there is proof he accepted an envelope. If the till runs short because he bought a thousand sacks of beans from an acquaintance at an unreasonable price, that is called business risk. When the owner asks why the till is empty, the answer will come calmly and most professionally: so sorry, sir, that is the risk of doing business.

There is wisdom worth acknowledging in the worry behind the proposal. It is hardly fair for an honest buyer to be jailed simply because the coffee he bought did not sell. Fear of a misstep can freeze an entire kitchen, with nobody daring to brew anything new. But the right remedy for a buyer afraid of error is clearer fencing, not the removal of every fence. That fencing might take the form of written guidelines for business decisions, recorded meetings and sensible checks, so that the honest are protected and the crooked are still caught. Taking down the fence to protect the honest buyer is no different from letting everyone in, including those who never meant to brew anything at all.

For here lies the heart of the matter. Corruption, as we have understood it so far, does not take the form of envelopes under the table alone. In Indonesian statute books it also covers abuse of authority, embezzlement in office, extortion, and certain kinds of gratuities. The international convention cited as the basis is, according to some experts, not as narrow as the headline it is made to carry. It speaks too of abuse of office, trading in influence, embezzlement and money laundering. Some scholars do take the opposite view, holding that the element of state loss is unusual in many other countries, and we ought to hear them out. Yet to read a convention that thick and remember only one word on its cover, bribery, is rather like buying a full cookbook and using only the page on boiling water.

A definition that shrinks in this way is like a jumper washed too hot. The thieves do not become fewer; only the garment shrinks, leaving parts of the body uncovered. Conduct long regarded as corrupt, such as odd decisions riddled with conflicts of interest yet lacking proof of an envelope, could become hard for the law to reach. And, ironically, those who most readily shelter behind the phrase business risk are not the honest buyers. They are those most skilled at making a loss look like an act of market fate. In any coffee shop, so sorry, that is the risk of doing business is the favourite sentence of a man whose till has gone missing without a receipt.

I am puzzled, too, by the timetable. It is said that the government and the House of Representatives plan to pass a law on asset forfeiture for criminal proceeds before the year is out, so that the fruits of crime can be seized and returned to the state. A noble plan. Yet a small question comes from the corner table: how do we seize assets from conduct whose definition has just been narrowed so that it no longer counts as corruption? The warehouse door is flung wide to recover stolen goods, while the garden fence is pulled in so that many no longer count as thieves. These two policies ought to run side by side, not cancel each other out.

So, if this shop truly wishes to be bold and safe at once, there is a middle path that need not change the meaning of a word. Draw a clearer line between a reasonable business decision and abuse of authority. Affirm protection for decision-makers who act in good faith and in the open. Strengthen the way losses are calculated so that it no longer looks arbitrary, including settling which body has the authority to count them. That way, the honest need not fear brewing, and the crooked have nowhere to hide. Even the bitterest satire, in the end, wants only to say one thing: do not mend a leak by taking the bucket from beneath the drip.

I finished my coffee slowly. It still tasted like coffee, neither more bitter nor sweeter. But I know the easiest coffee to drink is the kind whose measure is clear, whose beans are clear, whose cashier is clear, and whose books are open to anyone who cares to ask. And when a shop sets out to change the meaning of the word leak, perhaps what most needs checking is no longer the dictionary, but who will benefit most from the new definition.

Bahasa