From the Mandala Shoes, Notebooks, and YBS Pencil to the Governor's Official Residence in East Kalimantan

This article is a column; its entire content and opinions represent the personal views of the author and do not reflect the editorial stance.

The “Mandala Shoes” case, notebooks, and pencil associated with the tragedy of the student with initials YBS in East Nusa Tenggara should not end merely as a sorrowful news story that fades from the public sphere. The event is actually a social alarm about the still wide gap between state policies and the realities of life for the small people. According to various reports, YBS is suspected to have experienced psychological pressure due to limited school supplies, leading to feelings of shame in her social environment. Regardless of the final outcome of the official investigation into the case, this tragedy has shaken public awareness that poverty in Indonesia is no longer just present in the form of food shortages or economic access, but also in the form of social pressure and loss of self-confidence. Ironically, at almost the same time, the public was also presented with the polemic regarding the governor’s official residence in East Kalimantan. These two events from different regions indeed have no direct connection, but in the social perception of the people, they meet at one common point: the contrast between the basic needs of the small people and the symbols of elite power facilities. Society today no longer judges the government solely by administrative compliance or budget legality. In the digital democracy era, the legitimacy of power is increasingly determined by the government’s moral sensitivity towards the most vulnerable groups. Formally, the provision of facilities for regional heads certainly has a legal basis and bureaucratic arguments. However, from the perspective of modern governance science, public policy never stands in a completely neutral space. Every budget decision always has ethical, symbolic, and psychological dimensions in the eyes of the public. Political scientist Harold Lasswell in Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936) explains that the core of politics is actually about the distribution of resources and the bias of power. Therefore, every budget policy fundamentally always reflects who is prioritised and who is ignored by the state. In that context, society does not merely ask whether a state expenditure is legal or not, but whether the policy reflects a sense of social justice.