The BPES Promise Debt and the Eight Percent Growth Engine

Let us begin with a stinging paradox. On one hand, we have set an extremely ambitious dream: national economic growth soaring to 8 percent per year. On the other hand, we are actually sitting on a ‘treasure trove’ of social liquidity with zero cost of capital that lies dormant—reaching Rp 327.6 trillion from zakat potential and around Rp 180 trillion from cash waqf potential each year.

Yet in reality, our zakat collection is only crawling at around 10 percent of its potential, and cumulative cash waqf has only reached Rp 2.23 trillion. We are like owners of a turbo-charged racing car left parked in the garage, while we continue to complain about being tired from walking.

Chasing the eight percent growth leap can no longer rely solely on business-as-usual fiscal and monetary instruments. We need a new lever. Destry Damayanti, during her fit-and-proper test at the DPR (26/8/2026), firmly underlined that financial inclusion and the Islamic economy (Eksyar) are the primary game changers for Indonesia to break through that sacred target.

Why does Eksyar deserve to be called a game changer? The answer lies in its fundamental uniqueness. Referring to the classical thought of M.N. Siddiqi in Economics of Islam, the sharia system rests on distributive justice that opposes empty, intangible speculation, and forces every financial transaction to be directly tied to real sector activity. This system inherently prevents destructive economic bubbles.

In the realm of global innovation, Indonesia has even pioneered a blended finance engineering recognised worldwide through the Cash Waqf Linked Sukuk (CWLS) instrument. Through this scheme, cash waqf funds from the public are absorbed by the state via bonds to finance APBN infrastructure projects, while the returns are channelled to fund social programmes such as educational scholarships and clean water sanitation. This is an elegant policy design that finances the nation’s development engine while simultaneously striking hard at the roots of poverty at the grassroots level.

So where does our deadlock lie? The problem is rooted in institutional governance.

All this time, the orchestration of Eksyar has been controlled by the National Committee for Islamic Economy and Finance (KNEKS). This institution has played a significant role; KNEKS is the architect behind the birth of the giant Bank Syariah Indonesia (BSI) and successfully maintained Indonesia’s position at third place globally in the prestigious State of the Global Islamic Economy (SGIE) 2024/2025 report. However, there is a warning alarm behind that report: our halal food sector ranking has actually slipped to fourth place globally, hampered by bureaucratic inefficiency and weak supply chains.

This operational decline occurs because KNEKS is essentially only a non-structural, coordinating body. It is like a conductor without a baton of authority, or a general without executing troops in the field. KNEKS is not equipped with an independent execution budget. As a result, even the most brilliant roadmaps often wither before they can bloom because they are held hostage by high sectoral egos among ministries. If we look at Malaysia, they are able to consistently be a global champion because they are supported by centralised institutions with binding legal force and large budgets, such as the Halal Development Corporation (HDC) and JAKIM.

Herein lies the urgency of President Prabowo Subianto’s political promise, which was once mentioned by K.H. Ma’ruf Amin: transforming KNEKS into the Islamic Economy Development Agency (BPES). The Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Management at IPB, Irfan Syauqi Beik, projects that the existence of BPES—ideally at the level of a Non-Ministerial Government Institution (LPNK)—is an absolute prerequisite for it to become a pillar of the economy. With this status, BPES would no longer merely ‘ask for help’ from other ministries, but would possess the muscle of authority to manage budgets, issue regulations, and execute programmes independently.

So, how does the macroeconomic transmission work so that this institutional transformation can contribute to eight percent growth?

The answer lies in the creation of a multiplier effect. The Halal Value Chain (HVC) sector has been empirically proven to have a massive multiplier effect on GDP value-added creation and labour absorption. Unfortunately, our Islamic banking share is still stuck in the range of 7-8 percent. Through the steady hand of BPES, the government could launch a special guarantee scheme so that Islamic banking liquidity could flood millions of halal industry MSMEs, simultaneously upgrading their class and ultimately boosting national export capacity.

Furthermore, let us look at the giant potential that is always before our eyes yet whose added value often leaks abroad: the procurement of hajj and umrah needs. Every year, hundreds of thousands of our pilgrims fly to the Holy Land, creating an ecosystem of logistics, catering, and accommodation demand worth trillions of rupiah. Yet ironically, the food supply for our pilgrims is often filled by products from competitor countries. This is where BPES could act as the central orchestrator.

Imagine an integrative policy under BPES command: the agency consolidates domestic agricultural food MSMEs, facilitates their halal certification quickly, and ensures working capital disbursement from Islamic banks. BPES then mandates that all hajj catering needs be supplied absolutely from the local HVC ecosystem.

Meanwhile, processing infrastructure or cold chain facilities are funded through productive waqf funds or CWLS. The result? Trillions in foreign exchange will not spill over to other countries. The money purely circulates domestically in aggregate, creating an import substitution effect, driving village economies, and providing a very real GDP leverage.

Ultimately, the eight percent economic growth target is not an optical illusion in macroeconomics, as long as we are astute in identifying and pulling the right lever. Transforming KNEKS into BPES is not a cosmetic administrative matter of merely changing the agency’s nameplate. It is a fundamental institutional engineering to ignite a new growth engine.

If the ‘ignition key’ called BPES is not turned soon, the potential of hundreds of trillions of rupiah in our Islamic economy will forever remain just a series of sweet numbers on presentation paper, rather than becoming the backbone that delivers us towards a Golden Indonesia.