If diplomacy has value, Prabowo needs to show the numbers

Every few weeks, it seems, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto returns from another overseas trip bearing a headline figure. Tokyo: (Opens in new window)US (Opens in new window)$23 billion (Opens in new window). Seoul: US$10 billion. London and Beijing: another (Opens in new window)US (Opens in new window)$18 billion combined (Opens in new window). By June, his cabinet secretary was citing (Opens in new window) Investment Coordinating Board data to claim the President’s travels had brought in roughly Rp 2,430 trillion – about US$136 billion – in 18 months.

The message is consistent: the President is on the road, and Indonesia is cashing in.

The trouble is that almost none of these numbers mean what they are presented to mean. They are pledges and memoranda of understanding, announced at forums and rarely revisited. Under President Joko Widodo, headline investment figures from state visits routinely dwarfed what eventually showed up as realised investment. Japan illustrates this: the US$23 billion pledged after Prabowo’s March trip this year to Tokyo compares with realised Japanese investment of just (Opens in new window)US (Opens in new window)$3.1 billion for the whole of 2025 (Opens in new window). Big energy projects take years to build. But the gap between announcement and delivery is difficult for the public to track.

The scale of the travel behind these numbers is not in dispute. Since taking office in October 2024, Prabowo has visited at least 29 countries (Opens in new window) in more than 50 overseas engagements, and by one count has spent at least 99 days abroad on official visits (Opens in new window).

In May this year, the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia’s founder, Dino Patti Djalal, argued the pace had become difficult to justify. Aide Teddy Indra Wijaya defended it (Opens in new window), adding a fiscal claim: that “any excess costs from the state budget are entirely borne by President Prabowo himself.” That claim has exactly the same problem as the investment figures. It may well be true. But there is no published breakdown of what a trip costs the state, what portion has been personally covered, or how the claim could be checked – so the public is again asked to take a headline assertion on faith, this time about spending rather than investment.

The debate over Prabowo’s travel is being fought entirely with unverifiable headline claims on both sides. A government that wants to settle it in its own favour has every incentive to publish the follow-through data – or it can keep relying on totals and assurances that are impossible to verify and easy to inflate, or to deflect.

The fix is not complicated, and it does not require resolving whether the President travels too often. It requires publishing, after every trip, a simple scorecard: how much announced investment has been disbursed, which agreements have moved into implementation, and which have lapsed. It could cover how many jobs have been created, what technology transfer has taken place, what the trip cost the state and whether any of it was covered personally, as claimed. All this can include a public timeline, with named ministries responsible.

Indonesia already has the infrastructure to build such a report. BKPM, the country’s investment coordinating board, tracks how much pledged investment is realised. Danantara, the sovereign wealth fund Prabowo launched to convert pledges into projects, exists for exactly this purpose. The Foreign Ministry keeps records of agreements, and Finance already accounts for travel budgets.

What is missing is not data, but a habit of publishing it – a standing rule that the numbers, and the costs, announced on departure are matched, on a fixed schedule, by figures published on return.

There is a straightforward accountability case for this. Foreign trips consume presidential time, cabinet attention and travel budgets that could go elsewhere, whatever the right frequency of travel turns out to be. If Prabowo’s government wants credit for active, personally led economic diplomacy – and it clearly does, given how quickly it reaches for pledge totals and cost assurances whenever critics raise doubts – it should be equally willing to be judged on delivery, and to have its cost claims checked rather than simply repeated.

Announcing a pledge, or a claim of personal frugality, and staying silent about the details invites the scepticism critics like Dino Patti Djalal have voiced. There is a diplomatic case too: Indonesia’s push for foreign investors to process raw materials domestically will only work if capital actually arrives and plants get built. Realisation data published against commitments would show which partners are following through – better leverage than a tally of ceremonial totals.

This is not an argument about whether Prabowo travels too often, or whether a president should cover any of his own official costs in the first place – those are genuine, separate debates. It is an argument that whatever the right answers turn out to be, the public should not have to take the government’s word for what each trip delivered, or cost. If the numbers hold up, the government has nothing to fear from publishing them. If they do not, the public has every right to know that too.