JAKARTA: President Prabowo Subianto’s free nutritious meals programme suffered another setback after the recently appointed head of the National Nutrition Agency (BGN), Nanik Sudaryati Deyang, stepped down, adding to a string of governance problems that have dogged the flagship initiative in recent months.
Nanik announced her resignation on Facebook on Wednesday, saying she had asked Prabowo to relieve her of her duties so she could undergo treatment overseas for a heart condition.
“I have conveyed to the President, with my deepest apologies, that I had to resign as BGN chief due to health reasons,” Nanik said, adding that Prabowo had accepted her resignation.
In a previous Facebook post on Tuesday evening, hours before stepping down, Nanik said doctors had found a blockage in one of her heart arteries. She attributed the condition partly to severe stress from overseeing the free meals agency.
Handling the programme’s massive budget had become a source of “acute trauma”, Nanik said, likening the responsibility of safeguarding public funds to “standing on the edge of a steep cliff” where even a slight misstep could prove “deadly”.
“I was so afraid of handling such a large budget that I refused to sign anything on my own [...] I questioned every policy over and over again,” she said.
Nanik’s resignation came less than two months after she was appointed to replace former BGN head Dadan Hindayana, who was arrested with two of his deputies in a corruption investigation linked to the free meals programme days after being dismissed by Prabowo in early June.
Before taking the helm, Nanik had served as Dadan’s deputy. She was later tapped to restore confidence in the agency following the Attorney General’s Office probe into alleged procurement and financial irregularities surrounding the multitrillion-rupiah programme.
Just hours after accepting Nanik’s resignation, Prabowo appointed Deputy Agriculture Minister Sudaryono as the new BGN head in a ceremony at the State Palace in Jakarta on Wednesday.
Sudaryono is a politician from Prabowo’s Gerindra Party and served as Prabowo’s aide in the 2010s.
Acknowledging shortcomings in the agency’s governance, Sudaryono pledged to improve transparency and accountability.
“What has not been transparent must become transparent. If there are still manual processes, we will digitalise them so everything can be properly recorded,” he said after his inauguration.
“Nothing should happen behind closed doors anymore.”
Nanik’s departure marked the latest disruption for the agency overseeing one of Prabowo’s campaign promises, which has faced mounting scrutiny over governance, implementation and spending since it was first rolled out in early 2025.
“This was certainly not a situation that we had hoped for,” State Secretary Prasetyo Hadi told reporters on Wednesday, saying Prabowo had instructed his administration to carry out comprehensive reforms at the agency following the corruption investigation.
Prasetyo said Sudaryono was chosen because he had been involved in developing the free meals programme from its early stages.
The programme has faced a series of operational and governance setbacks throughout its one-and-a-half years of operation, with questions over food quality and repeated mass poisoning incidents across the country.
In response to the criticism, Nanik imposed a moratorium on new kitchens while nearly 28,000 existing facilities nationwide were reviewed. The move prompted protests from thousands of prospective kitchen operators who had heavily invested in their facilities.
The government has also scaled back the programme, with the BGN announcing on Tuesday that it had reduced the provisional 2026 budget to Rp229 trillion (US$12.8 billion) from Rp268 trillion.
The agency also lowered this year’s beneficiary target to 62.7 million people. It had initially allocated Rp335 trillion for 2026 to provide free meals to 82.9 million beneficiaries, including schoolchildren, toddlers and pregnant women.
“Our priority is improving service quality rather than pursuing beneficiary numbers, so there is no fixed target at this stage,” BGN deputy chief Agustina Arumsari said on Tuesday.
Political analyst Wasisto Raharjo Jati said the recurring problems reflected “shortcomings in its planning” despite the political priority attached to the programme.
“The free meals programme is one of Prabowo’s flagship programmes, but these latest problems showed that, institutionally, it has been driven more by political ambition than technocratic preparation,” Wasisto said. – Jakarta Post/ANN
