Jokowi Reveals Dumatno Connection at Diploma Trial: Still a Relative, but Only 8 Years Old When Diploma Was Issued

Joko Widodo has finally spoken about Dumatno Budi Utomo, the figure long alleged to be the person in the photo on his bachelor's diploma. At a hearing at the East Jakarta District Court on Thursday (5/11), the 7th President of Indonesia stressed that Dumatno is a distant relative, not the face in his graduation document.

According to Jokowi, Dumatno is still connected to him by bloodline. "Dumatno Budi Utomo is my distant cousin. We share one great-grandfather," he said before the panel of judges while testifying in the alleged fake diploma case against defendant dr. Tifa.

The crucial point: Jokowi said Dumatno was born in 1977. That means when the bachelor's diploma from Universitas Gadjah Mada was issued on 5 November 1985, Dumatno was only about eight years old. "Dumatno was still around 8 years old, Your Honor," Jokowi said, emphasizing the point.

This testimony is not the first. At the hearing with defendant Roy Suryo, Jokowi had also dismissed the claim that the photo on the diploma was not his. He stressed that the photo was of him, and questioned the logic of using someone else's photo for a personal diploma. "That is my photo, Your Honor. Why would Dumatno Budi Utomo's photo be put there?" he said.

The case began with a narrative circulating on social media and later moved into the legal realm. Roy Suryo and his camp were said to have linked the photo on Jokowi's diploma to Dumatno. But the facts in court turned that assumption on its head: beyond the distant blood relation, the age factor makes the claim hard to accept on common sense.

Legal observer from Universitas Indonesia, Ahmad Rizal, assessed that Jokowi's testimony dealt a heavy blow to the narrative built by the accusers. "If Dumatno was indeed born in 1977, then mathematically it is impossible for him to appear in a 1985 diploma photo. This weakens the construction of the accusation," Rizal said when contacted separately.

More than an individual matter, this hearing highlights the widespread politicization of personal documents in the public sphere. A diploma, which should be an academic record, has turned into a political weapon. Jokowi himself chose to take legal action to prove the validity of his diploma, a step rarely taken by public officials.

With this latest testimony, the public now waits to see how the panel of judges weighs all the evidence, including Jokowi's testimony and authentic documents from UGM. If the accusation proves unfounded, this case could set a precedent so that defamatory narratives against educational track records are no longer used as political commodity.