By Laksamana Sukardi
Bankers are taught a simple truth: never feed fried rice to a baby. A baby cannot digest it and may die. The metaphor is obvious—never give a loan beyond what the borrower can handle. Overextended credit turns into bad debt.
The same logic applies to public office. Promoting someone beyond their competence is as reckless as overfeeding a child. What looks like a reward can quickly become a disaster.
Management scholars have long understood this. In Why Things Always Go Wrong, Dr. Laurence J. Peter introduced the Peter Principle: people are promoted until they reach the point where they can no longer perform. In other words, yesterday’s star performer can easily become today’s failure—if pushed into the wrong role.
In business, the consequences may be financial loss. In politics, the damage is far greater—public trust, institutions, and national credibility are at stake. Yet politics routinely ignores the Peter Principle. Appointments to senior government and state-owned enterprises are too often based not on competence, but on loyalty and political debt.
The fall of Immanuel Ebenezer, the Deputy Minister of Manpower arrested in a KPK sting, is a textbook case. Barely a year into his job, he committed a fatal blunder that stained Indonesia’s governance. His failure was not an anomaly but an inevitability—a product of a system that rewards loyalty over capability.
If this pattern is the rule rather than the exception, then Ebenezer is not a one-off. He is the tip of the iceberg. His case is not a sudden symptom of acute illness, but proof of a chronic disease that has long infected political appointments.
The hard truth is this: as long as loyalty and patronage remain the main qualifications for high office, Indonesia will keep seeing the Peter Principle in action. More unfit officials will be promoted. More scandals will erupt. And the public will keep paying the price.
In short, unless the culture of appointment changes, we will continue to witness the same tragedy—more “babies being fed fried rice.”
