A Jakarta appeals court cut Nadiem Makarim’s prison sentence on 24 September, from ten years to nine, over a school laptop program that Indonesian prosecutors say cost the state roughly US$125 million. Makarim co-founded Gojek, the motorbike-taxi app that made him a billionaire before he turned forty, by picking one fix and moving fast. As Indonesia’s education minister, a court has now twice called that same instinct corruption.

He says he will appeal again, to the Supreme Court.

In 2010, Makarim was twenty-six, freshly out of Harvard Business School, and convinced that Jakarta’s ojek drivers, the motorbike taxis that thread the city’s traffic lane by lane, were sitting on a business nobody had bothered to organise. He signed up twenty of them, put them in matching jackets, and ran their bookings through a call centre he staffed himself.

Five years later he put the whole operation in an app. Within two years it had been downloaded nearly thirty million times, and Gojek became Indonesia’s first startup worth more than US$10 billion.

The instinct behind that first roster never really changed as the company grew: Jakarta’s traffic was a solved problem sitting inside an unsolved one, and somebody just had to commit to one design and ship it before a committee could argue him out of it. Thirteen years later, prosecutors would describe a different committee he skipped, and price it in years.

Makarim resigned from Gojek’s board and gave up his shares in October 2019, the same month President Joko Widodo made him education minister. GoTo, the company Gojek later merged into, says he has held no stake in it since.

Inside the ministry, Makarim ran a Chromebook program for Indonesian schools between 2020 and 2022 the same way he had run Gojek’s first twenty drivers: pick one fix, specify it tightly, move before a slower process can catch up. Prosecutors say the ministry’s technical specifications fit only Google’s Chrome operating system, that the laptops were bought without the price checks Indonesian procurement law requires, and that Makarim personally benefited from the scheme.

A Jakarta court convicted him in June, sentencing him to ten years and ordering restitution of roughly US$45 million (Rp809.6 billion). The September appeal kept the conviction, cut the term to nine years, and lowered the restitution to US$30.6 million (Rp548 billion), while upholding a US$56,000 (Rp1 billion) fine.1

Prosecutors valued the state’s loss at roughly US$125 million. The amount a court can actually order Makarim to repay, after one appeal, is now about a quarter of that.

Google, whose Chrome operating system the specifications allegedly fit and no other, has denied any role in shaping them.

Most coverage has treated the case as a tech founder who went into politics and got caught. The more useful read is narrower: the mechanism that built Gojek out of twenty motorbikes is the same mechanism a court has now priced at nine years in prison.

Picking one vendor, specifying it tightly, and moving before a deliberative process can slow you down is how a founder spends his own capital and takes his own risk. It is also, prosecutors argued and two courts have now agreed, how a minister commits abuse of authority when the capital is the state’s and the risk is a schoolchild’s laptop budget.

The habit that built Gojek did not update itself for whose money it was spending next.

The habit that built Gojek did not update itself for whose money it was spending next.

That is the file prosecutors built, and the one both Indonesian courts have now signed.

This column bets Indonesia’s Supreme Court upholds Makarim’s core conviction on cassation review within the next twelve months, trimming the sentence again without erasing the verdict. The bet rests on one thing: Indonesia’s cassation court corrects errors of law, not fresh readings of fact, and two lower courts have already read the same procurement file, the same specifications, and the same missing price checks the same way.

Makarim built an empire by proving that twenty motorbikes, organised well, beat a taxi monopoly that never bothered to compete. A Jakarta court has now ruled that a ministry, organised the same way, does not get to skip competing either.

Makarim built an empire by proving that twenty motorbikes, organised well, beat a taxi market that had never bothered to compete for it. A Jakarta court has now ruled that a ministry, organised the same way, does not get to skip competing either.

Footnotes

  1. A ministry aide named Jurist Tan became known inside the ministry as “the real minister” for the influence she carried over the same procurement file. She was charged alongside Makarim and remains a fugitive from Indonesia’s Attorney General’s Office. ↩