It’s easy to diagnose dysfunction from the comfort of Manhattan — from a city that so often mistakes its own glittering skyline for the center of the world. It’s harder to admit that the narrative being written is shaped not by the complexity of this country, but by the bias of that vantage point. When the same thing happens in the West, it’s a problem to fix. When it happens in the South, it’s proof we’re not ready. That’s not objectivity. That’s hierarchy in ink.

The coverage of Indonesia’s free school lunch program, Makan Bergizi Gratis (MBG), is a familiar story. A large social program launches. It stumbles — as all large programs do in their first year. A scandal breaks. And then, like clockwork, a chorus of Global North media outlets descend to narrate the failure from afar, not merely as an event, but as evidence of something bigger: that countries like ours simply can’t handle ambition.

Yes, the failures are real. Kitchens fell short of hygiene standards. Foodborne illnesses occurred. Regulation lagged behind the scale of the program. These are serious problems that must be addressed with urgency. But the narrative exported from the North rarely acknowledges the terrain in which these problems occur. Context is treated as a footnote — when it is, in fact, the entire story.

Large-scale social programs have stumbled everywhere. China’s rural nutrition program began with serious hygiene lapses before becoming one of the most important child nutrition efforts in the world. India’s mid-day meal program faced deadly food poisoning incidents before regulatory systems caught up. Even the United States has weathered its share of contaminated lunch scandals. Yet when these failures occur in the North, they’re framed as institutional issues to fix. When they happen here, they’re framed as confirmation of systemic incapacity. Same failure. Different framing.

This isn’t just sloppy storytelling. It’s a legacy.

For centuries, the Global North has positioned itself not only as narrator of the world but as its evaluator — grading other countries with its own ruler. The language has evolved, but the posture has not. Once it was “civilizing” and “modernizing.” Now it’s “governance,” “best practice,” and “capacity.” The tone is softer, but the hierarchy remains intact.

That ruler is forged in places with deep fiscal resources, dense administrative infrastructures, and centuries of institutional accumulation — often built on the extraction of the very regions now being measured against it. Applying a Euro-American metric of what a “functioning state” looks like to countries with different political incentives, fiscal structures, and geographical terrains is not analysis. It’s epistemic erasure.

Indonesia is not a city-state with homogenous infrastructure. It is an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, a nation with uneven capacity, layered governance, and logistical constraints that cannot — and should not — be assessed through a Western welfare template. Yet the narrative from Manhattan flattens all this into an easy story of ambition outpacing competence. It’s like comparing an apple to a chicken and then blaming the chicken for not crunching right.

And this is not about one outlet. This is a systemic pattern across Global North media. It is a structure of narrative power that positions their gaze as universal. It shapes how countries like Indonesia are imagined in Washington, Brussels, Canberra. It influences investment decisions, diplomatic postures, and development strategies. It defines reputations, often more powerfully than any official communiqué. That power should come with humility. Too often, it comes with the soft arrogance of presumed expertise.

This is not a plea for gentler coverage. Indonesia, like any other state, should be scrutinized. Our failures should be examined — and fixed. But that scrutiny should not be built on imported assumptions that flatten context, ignore history, and reinforce hierarchies disguised as neutrality.

The empire doesn’t always arrive with soldiers. Sometimes, it arrives in neatly edited copy and confident prose. But the power it wields over how the Global South is imagined — and judged — is no less real.

We don’t need Manhattan to tell us when we’ve failed. We need them to stop mistaking their vantage point for the only lens through which the world can be seen.