Prabowo's Cabinet Reshuffle: A New Hajj Ministry, One Fewer Domino Player

On 8 September 2025, President Prabowo Subianto carried out the second reshuffle of his Merah Putih (Red and White) Cabinet, swapping out several ministers, among them the Coordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs, the Finance Minister, the Minister of Migrant Worker Protection, the Minister of Cooperatives, and the Youth and Sports Minister. ^[1] State Secretariat Minister Prasetyo Hadi delivered the announcement at the Presidential Palace. The country got a fresh cabinet lineup. It also got a new ministry.

That ministry is the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah, carved out to handle Indonesia’s pilgrimage logistics on its own, with Mochamad Irfan Yusuf installed as its first minister and Dahnil Anzar Simanjuntak as his deputy. ^[2] Pilgrimage administration is a genuinely large logistical undertaking, and previous arrangements have drawn complaints. Whether it required its own cabinet seat and its own minister, rather than a beefed-up directorate, is the kind of question that tends to get asked after the fact.

Asked why the reshuffle happened now, Prasetyo Hadi said the decision followed “various considerations, inputs, and evaluations” that the President carries out continuously. ^[3] The sentence says everything and nothing at once. It is an answer engineered to survive a press conference without generating a follow-up question. It is exactly the kind of answer that generates a follow-up question.

Among the ministers who did not survive the reshuffle was Abdul Kadir Karding, until then the Minister of Migrant Worker Protection (P2MI). Shortly before his removal, a photo had circulated showing Karding playing dominoes late into the night with Forestry Minister Raja Juli Antoni and a man identified in reporting as Azis Wellang, described elsewhere as a suspect in illegal logging. ^[4] Karding, replaced by Mukhtarudin, has said the reshuffle was not connected to the photo. The cabinet did not offer a parallel explanation for why the Forestry Minister, present at the same table, remains in his post. Consistency, like the missing fourth player’s identity in most of these photos, is apparently optional.

Put the two threads together and the reshuffle tells a fairly ordinary story about Indonesian cabinet politics. A government can simultaneously create an entire new ministry to formalize something as procedural as pilgrimage logistics, while offering the vaguest possible language for why a minister photographed with an accused illegal logger at midnight is suddenly available for other opportunities. Institution-building and accountability do not have to move at the same speed. One gets a purpose-built ministry with a minister and a deputy sworn in the same afternoon. The other gets “various considerations, inputs, and evaluations” and a next-day reassignment memo.

None of this required a scandal to justify itself. Reshuffles happen, ministries get created, personnel move on. The only thing worth noting is how little connective tissue the government bothered to supply between the parts of the story that are administratively tidy and the parts that are merely convenient. A new ministry gets a name, a minister, and a launch date. A minister’s exit gets a euphemism. Both are technically cabinet business. Only one of them required somebody to actually explain themselves.