A 10-year-old elementary school student’s suicide in East Nusa Tenggara has shaken the nation and prompted an outpouring of grief and commentary. Senior officials have issued statements of concern. The National Secretary, Prasetyo Hadi, noted that the tragedy has captured the President’s attention and called for preventive and anticipatory measures. The Governor of East Nusa Tenggara, Emanuel Melkiades Laka Lena, went further, publicly acknowledging that his administration failed to protect the people under its care.
These remarks matter. But they fall short of what accountability requires. Expressions of concern, without an explicit apology, risk signaling that the state recognizes a problem yet declines to accept responsibility for the harm suffered. If the government is serious about accountability, it should say so unambiguously: We apologize.
Responsibility requires more than recognition
Responsibility is more than acknowledging that something went wrong. In moral terms, responsibility arises when an agent owes duties to others (van de Poel, 2015). In this case, the “others” are the child and the family, those most directly harmed. According to media reports, the family appeared to be living in extreme poverty and faced administrative barriers to accessing government assistance. When a family’s basic needs go unmet and bureaucratic obstacles block relief, individual misfortune merges with systemic failure. That is precisely when the state’s obligation to protect and to prevent foreseeable harm becomes most salient.
A responsible response has two parts. First, it names the failure: policies, delivery systems, and safeguards did not work as they should. Second, it addresses the people who were harmed, not only with concern but with remorse, an official apology that recognizes the breach of obligation leading to the tragedy.
Who, exactly, is responsible?
Some will object that national or provincial level officials were not present in the child’s everyday life and therefore cannot be held responsible. But moral and political responsibility in public office does not hinge on physical proximity. As van de Poel (2015) argues, responsibility as obligation can be delegated even when duty cannot be personally fulfilled in every instance. Officeholders oversee the systems that either prevent or permit harm. They design policies, allocate budgets, set performance standards, and remove barriers.
By that logic, both central officials and the governor hold obligations to protect their constituents and to prevent foreseeable harms, including those driven by poverty and exclusion. If the chain of causality runs through preventable administrative obstacles and inadequately targeted social protection, then leadership bears a real, if shared, responsibility.
No apology, no accountability
Officials have so far described the tragedy and signaled concern. Yet a crucial element is missing: a formal apology on behalf of the state. In the public’s eyes, that absence can be read as evasion. If poverty, exclusion from assistance, and structural inequities helped set the conditions for this loss as reported, then the state bears a share of responsibility. By failing to distribute resources justly and to ensure timely access to safety nets, the government did not meet its own standard of protection.
Accountability can be viewed as answerability: an agent owes an explanation for their attitudes and conducts to others (Smith, 2015). In this tragic incident, it is the duty of the officials to explain failures to those affected and to the public, and to accept the consequences of those failures. Admitting error is a start, but answerability also requires speaking directly to the harmed parties and committing to concrete remedies.
An apology reflects responsibility
An official apology is not a mere symbol. It is the institutional act that connects blameworthiness to remedy. As moral philosophers note, when officials accept blame, the appropriate reactive attitude is guilt, expressed publicly through apology (Carlsson, 2017). Without an apology, the officials have not adequately acted responsibly.
Furthermore, though some official investigation has been conducted to the failure of administration leading to the tragedy, which reflects the acknowledgment of harm to the victim and the family, it would be appropriate for the state to commits to remedies, such as compensation or assistance to the family, administrative fixes, and strengthened protections to reduce recurrence. It is a moral standard, after all, for officials to assume some responsibilities to set things right.
