Summary
- Ministers are struggling to communicate directly with President Prabowo due to heavy information filtering by the Cabinet Secretary.
- To overcome this, they plan to use unconventional methods like carrier pigeons, smoke signals, and banner planes.
- A new, well-funded agency will be created to manage these efforts, diverting money from healthcare budgets.
JAKARTA - In response to growing difficulties in securing face time or even basic correspondence with President Prabowo Subianto, several cabinet ministers are reportedly preparing to adopt “non-conventional communication methods”, including carrier pigeons, smoke signals, and aluminum cans attached to strings.
According to a recent Tempo report, Cabinet Secretary Teddy Indra Wijaya has allegedly become the sole gatekeeper of all information bound for the President. This includes filtering, redirecting, or simply forgetting to pass along messages depending on “mood, timing, and planetary alignment.”
Frustrated by unanswered texts and unreturned calls, ministers are now resorting to other alternatives. “We tried WhatsApp, encrypted email, and even old-fashioned knocking on the palace door,” said one senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity while feeding a group of test pigeons behind the Signal Corps of a local military base. “At this point, a bird has a better chance of getting a meeting than we do. We will just have to ensure that the president’s cat will not hunt them down before they reach the president.”
New agency to oversee communication efforts
The initiative, officially called the National Communication Restoration Task Force, is expected to receive a dedicated annual budget sourced from funds previously allocated to public healthcare programs. “It’s a small price to pay for administrative efficiency,” said one planning document. “Besides, if you’re healthy enough to complain, you’re healthy enough to deliver a message by hand.” The Task Force will also be complemented with 1 head and 5 deputies; 3 from the military, 1 from the ruling party, and 1 from the old friend of the president back in the military academy, to ensure smooth operations. The annual budget is yet to be agreed by the parliament in the next fiscal session.
An executive spokesperson confirmed that one of the leading candidates to head the new agency is a popular social media influencer who played a key role in the president’s election campaign. “This appointment is purely based on merit,” said the spokesperson. “As an artist, he understands messaging, aesthetics, and virality, hence all the competency of being a communicator. If he fails, we’ll just replace him with someone from the army. Communication is, after all, a matter of national defense, hence the matter for the army to interfere, once again.”
Meanwhile, engineers are said to be testing several low-flying aircraft equipped with banners to relay urgent memos directly above the presidential residence. “It’s a bit like crop dusting, but for policy updates,” said an aide. “If the president happens to look up, we might finally get something approved.”
As of press time, sources confirmed that the Ministry of Health’s attempt to send a status report via semaphore flags had been postponed indefinitely after the message was intercepted by a foreign Navy and mistaken for a declaration of war. This declaration is yet to be received by the president once the carrier pigeons are ready to fly.
Photo by Sanjiv Nayak on Unsplash. Other artwork are drawn in-house.
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