Minister Tells Teachers To Become Traders, Then Says Sorry

Last Wednesday, 3 September 2025, at the opening of a teacher professional education program (Pendidikan Profesi Guru, or PPG) at UIN Syarif Hidayatullah, a state Islamic university in Jakarta, Indonesia’s Minister of Religious Affairs, Nasaruddin Umar, offered the assembled trainee teachers a piece of career advice: if money is the goal, teaching is not the job. “Kalau mau cari uang jangan jadi guru, jadi pedagang lah” — “If you want to make money, don’t become a teacher, become a trader instead” — he told the room, addressing an audience whose entire professional purpose was, at that moment, to become teachers. ^[1]

The remark did not stay inside the auditorium. Clips circulated online within days, and reaction from teachers was not warm. By the time the criticism peaked, Nasaruddin had walked the comment back. “Saya menyadari bahwa potongan pernyataan saya tentang guru menimbulkan tafsir yang kurang tepat dan melukai perasaan sebagian guru. Untuk itu, saya memohon maaf yang sebesar-besarnya. Tidak ada niat sedikitpun bagi saya untuk merendahkan profesi guru” — he said he realized the clipped version of his statement had produced an inaccurate interpretation and hurt some teachers’ feelings, apologized “as sincerely as possible,” and insisted he never meant to demean the teaching profession. ^[2]

Read literally, the minister’s advice and his apology sit oddly close together. He told a room of teachers-in-training that their chosen field would not pay, then apologized not for the economics but for how the sentence sounded once it left the room. Both things can be true. Indonesian civil-servant teacher salaries are a matter of public record and public complaint; whether trading is in fact the more lucrative path is not something the ministry offered data on either way. Nobody, notably, has apologized for that part.

The clip caught fire for a reason that had less to do with teachers, or traders. It landed in the middle of a much louder round of public anger over how much Indonesian government officials — ministers very much included — take home in salary and allowances, once those figures started circulating. A minister casually ranking teaching below trading, in that climate, read less like career counseling and more like a rare unscripted glimpse into how the people setting teacher pay actually think about pay.

It would be useful, in that context, to know what Nasaruddin himself earns. This turns out to be harder to establish than the question should be. Cabinet ministers’ official base salaries are set by government regulation, but the allowances, operational budgets, and honoraria layered on top of that base are not routinely published in a single, citable place — which means any specific total is an estimate, not a fact, and this article is not going to manufacture one just to complete the irony. The honest answer is that the take-home pay of the man giving unsolicited financial advice to teachers is not public information. The minister was confident enough about relative earning potential to advise a room full of professionals to change careers, in a system where his own compensation isn’t confident enough to publish itself.