ECONOMIC OXYGEN

   KopiTalk with MHO

 

 

ECONOMIC OXYGEN

Brunei's Late Payment Crisis and the Policy Fix Already Written

Malai Hassan Othman  |  May 2026

 A construction company owner with more than 30 years in Brunei's industry recently told Borneo Bulletin that he was considering early retirement — not because work had dried up, but because payment for completed government work had still not reached him.

Documents, he said, had been uploaded into the system. Follow-ups had been made. The invoices were there. The money was not.

That sentence should not sit comfortably in a country with a BND6.3 billion national budget.

Yet it does exist. And it has not appeared in isolation. For the better part of two years, Borneo Bulletin's Opinion pages have carried public concern over delayed payments following the launch of the Treasury Accounting and Financial Information System, TAFIS 2.0, on a new SAP platform at the start of Financial Year 2024/2025.

The Ministry of Finance and Economy acknowledged payment issues within weeks, issued a public apology in June 2024, and set up a Payment Clinic at its building. By December 2024, some contractors were publicly reporting payments overdue for long periods. By November 2025, the construction veteran's letter had appeared. By April 2026 — the start of Financial Year 2026/2027 — TAFIS 2.0 had entered its third year of operation, while public concern over payment delays had not fully disappeared.

The government invested in a sophisticated payment system. The harder question is whether the payment culture around it has kept pace.

That distinction matters. The system itself should not be treated as the whole story. Teething problems with large financial platforms are not unusual, and the Treasury Department's acknowledgement of the problem was, at least, candid. The real issue is what followed: public apologies, a Payment Clinic, repeated letters from affected businesses, and lingering concern over whether payment discipline has been restored in a way that gives confidence to the private sector.

The system may have improved. The payment culture remains under question.

Smaller contractors — those without deep reserves to absorb months of delayed receivables — are often the first to feel the pressure. As one contractor described it, authorities continued to expect work to be completed while payment remained outstanding. Bank loans still needed servicing. Workers still needed wages. Materials still had to be paid for. Some firms, according to public accounts, struggled to meet these obligations. Others survived only by drawing down on whatever savings remained.

Payment speed is not an administrative courtesy. It is economic infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Singapore provides a comparison that is difficult to ignore. Singapore's Ministry of Finance has confirmed in parliamentary debate that 98 per cent of invoices below S$5,000 billed to government agencies were paid ahead of their credit terms — and that over 99 per cent of all government invoices already run on 30-day or shorter credit terms as standard. The comparison surfaced in a local online discussion, where it attracted strong public engagement. The underlying question was fair: if prompt payment is achievable elsewhere, why should it remain difficult here?

The 22nd Session of the Legislative Council, which sat through 11 days of deliberation in March 2026, debated a BND150 million IT Central Procurement allocation and raised concerns about whether institutional capacity was keeping pace with hardware investment. It examined BND369 million in outstanding electricity arrears owed to the government. It asked questions about contractor supervision and project delivery quality.

What did not appear to receive comparable prominence was the plight of contractors who had completed government work, submitted their invoices, and were still waiting to be paid.

The people suffering most were not in the room.

Into this landscape comes a forthcoming policy paper that names the issue with uncommon precision. Ir Dato Paduka Malai Ali Malai Hj Othman — a former Permanent Secretary across the Ministry of Development, the Ministry of Transport and Communication, and the Ministry of Industry and Primary Resources, as well as former Director of the Civil Service Institute — has prepared a policy paper titled Public Procurement: Buy What Government Needs, Build What the Nation Needs Next.

 It is not yet published, but its argument already feels overdue.

“Financial compliance protects public money. Ease of Economic Participation multiplies public money. A modern procurement system must achieve both.”

— Ir Dato Paduka Malai Ali Malai Hj Othman

The paper introduces a concept called Ease of Economic Participation, or EEP — the idea that a healthy economy should not be measured only by whether firms can register and enter markets, but by whether they can survive, grow, and build genuine ownership within them.

Among the mandatory principles proposed for every Ministry, Department and Agency is one sentence that deserves to be read slowly:

Prompt payment is economic oxygen for SMEs.

The phrasing is exact. Oxygen is not a reward. It is not a gesture of goodwill. It is the minimum condition for survival. When payment is delayed for work already completed and accepted, the issue is not merely an administrative inconvenience. It becomes a constraint on cash flow, wages, loans, materials, trust, and the ability of local firms to keep operating.

The paper proposes a draft government circular mandating payment discipline as a formal procurement requirement — measured not only by tenders issued or budgets spent, but by payment timeliness as a key performance indicator. It calls for accessible opportunity design, proportionate qualification criteria, transparent pipelines, and recurring framework contracts that give SMEs the commercial predictability they need to invest, hire, and grow.

The credentials behind this prescription matter. Ir Dato Paduka Malai Ali did not write from outside the system. He served within it for decades, including at senior levels across development, transport, communication, industry, primary resources, and civil service training. His diagnosis is not an outsider's complaint. It is institutional memory speaking with reformer's intent.

The paper's framework also helps explain why a digital payment system alone cannot solve what is ultimately a governance problem. A system can be procured. But the ecosystem around it — change management, inter-agency coordination, clear responsibility, vendor communication, and payment accountability — must also be built.

The government can buy platforms. But platforms do not automatically build discipline.

What Brunei has accumulated across two years is not merely a trail of complaints. It is a body of warning signs: public apologies, payment clinics, affected contractors speaking out, and continuing concern from the business community. A Payment Clinic may help resolve individual cases. But the wider issue demands a systemic answer — the kind that formal rules, measurable KPIs, and payment discipline across ministries and departments can provide.

Brunei has the diagnosis. A distinguished former public servant, who spent a career inside the machinery now being examined, has written a prescription. The 22nd LegCo session came and went without this issue receiving the prominence it deserved.

A new financial year has begun. Contractors are still asking whether payment discipline has truly been restored. The proposed circular has not yet become policy. Somewhere in Brunei, a business owner with decades of completed work behind him is deciding whether it is time to close the books — not because he failed, but because the system he served did not pay him on time.

Prompt payment is not generosity. It is an obligation.

And when an obligation is deferred long enough, it becomes, for those waiting, a quiet kind of injustice.

 

 

 

Malai Hassan Othman is a veteran Brunei journalist, columnist and policy advisor.

KopiTalk with MHO  ·  kopitalkmho.blogspot.com

INCLUSIVE BUSINESS: BRUNEI'S NEW TEST BEYOND WELFARE AND CSR

As Brunei begins mapping its inclusive business landscape, the real question is whether ordinary people can be brought into the economy as participants — not merely as recipients of help.

 By Malai Hassan Othman

For years, Brunei has been telling its people to become entrepreneurs. The harder conversation is what happens to those who try — and find the economy has no real room for them.

Behind every training programme, every grant ceremony, every MSME initiative launched with optimism, there are people who started and quietly stopped. Not because they lacked drive. Because the system around them — the financing, the procurement chains, the market access, the mentoring — was not designed to sustain them.

This is the uncomfortable territory that a new national exercise is now being asked to map.

It is called the Inclusive Business in Brunei Darussalam Landscape Study — a joint initiative involving the Ministry of Finance and Economy, the Brunei Economic Development Board, Yayasan Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. Launched on 4 May 2026 at An-Naura Hall, Yayasan Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Complex, the study is followed by private sector consultations running through 8 May 2026.

The phrase Inclusive Business may not carry immediate meaning for the ordinary person. It does not have the familiar weight of welfare, zakat, grants or corporate social responsibility. But behind the terminology lies a serious proposition for Brunei: can the economy be shaped so that lower-income families, small suppliers, youth, women, persons with disabilities and other disadvantaged groups become part of the business chain itself — not as occasional beneficiaries, but as real commercial participants?

That is the question now being tested.

There is a difference between helping people and including them.

Welfare helps people survive. Charity eases hardship. CSR gives companies a way to give back. All have their place. But Inclusive Business asks for something more structurally demanding. It asks whether a company can build its actual business model — its supply chain, its workforce, its distribution network — around people who are normally left outside the formal economy.

The study draws on the G20 definition: inclusive businesses are companies that provide goods, services and livelihoods on a commercially viable basis to people at the base of the economic pyramid, integrating them into the core value chain as suppliers, distributors, retailers or customers.

That definition does the important work of separating Inclusive Business from feel-good charity.

It is not about giving someone a stall for a day. It is about whether that person can become a reliable supplier. Not hiring disadvantaged workers for publicity, but whether they can be trained, retained, protected and allowed to progress. Not helping a micro-entrepreneur once, but whether that entrepreneur can enter a real market, meet quality standards, access finance and survive beyond the first round of assistance.

For Brunei, this is not a foreign development concept imported for the sake of an ASEAN agenda. It sits at the centre of an economic challenge the country has been struggling to resolve for the better part of a decade.

Brunei has invested heavily in MSME development, entrepreneurship programmes and social support. The ambition is clear. The gap between that ambition and the lived experience of many small business owners, low-income families and disadvantaged workers remains visible and, in some areas, widening.

Many small businesses still cannot scale. Many young graduates still see the government as the safest employer. Many local suppliers still find larger procurement chains effectively closed to them. Many entrepreneurs can start — but not all of them survive the first two years, and far fewer build something that lasts.

Who gets to take part in the economy? Who gets access to real contracts? Who gets training that leads to genuine income? And who remains dependent on assistance because the market has no serious place for them?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the structural fault lines that any honest landscape study must be willing to name.

The interview framework developed for the study does not merely ask companies whether they are doing good. It asks harder questions: whether there is a commercial case for Inclusive Business in Brunei, what challenges prevent models from scaling, where financing gaps exist, what government policies help or hinder, and whether a formal recognition or accreditation system would add real value.

Those are the right questions.

Because without commercial viability, Inclusive Business becomes charity with nicer language. Without financing, it becomes another pilot project. Without procurement access, small suppliers stay small regardless of how many times they are encouraged to grow. Without impact measurement, anyone can claim to be inclusive. Without policy coherence, the concept stays trapped in workshops and reports — appearing in frameworks but not in income statements.

This is where Brunei's small size becomes both a constraint and an advantage.

The domestic market is limited. Many businesses already struggle with demand that is not big enough to sustain growth. For inclusive businesses expected to deliver both financial returns and social outcomes, the test is sharper still. But small size also enables faster coordination — if the institutional will exists. Government agencies, financial institutions, large companies, MSMEs and community organisations can be brought around the same table more quickly here than in larger economies. The challenge is not whether Brunei can convene the right conversations. The challenge is whether those conversations produce decisions.

One of the most consequential areas is procurement.

If large companies and government-linked entities are serious about inclusion, they must look honestly at how their supply chains actually work. Do they source from local MSMEs? Do they create genuine room for women-owned businesses, youth-led enterprises, social enterprises or community-based producers? Do they actively help small suppliers meet standards — or do they quietly reject them for not being ready, without ever helping them get ready?

The interview guide prepared for large corporations goes directly at this. It asks what percentage of procurement goes to inclusive or small suppliers, what barriers prevent their entry — quality, capacity, certification, price — and whether those barriers are being actively addressed or simply treated as convenient reasons to look elsewhere.

That line of questioning matters because inclusion cannot live on slogans.

A small food producer, a tailoring group, a farming cooperative, a community-based service provider or a youth-led digital business cannot grow if it is permanently excluded from serious markets. Training alone will not scale them. Motivation sessions will not pay their bills. Certificates will not win them orders.

They need buyers willing to invest in building capacity — not merely complain that small businesses are not ready.

For years, Brunei has encouraged entrepreneurship while placing most of the burden on the small entrepreneur. Be creative. Be resilient. Be innovative. All valid advice. But the system around them must also carry its share of the responsibility.

A micro-entrepreneur cannot become a serious supplier if payment is perpetually delayed. A small farmer cannot supply consistently without aggregation, cold-chain logistics or market assurance. A person with disability cannot be meaningfully employed if workplaces are not designed to include them. A single mother cannot sustain a home-based business without market access, fair pricing and practical support. A young entrepreneur cannot scale if financing for productive enterprise is harder to obtain than a vehicle loan.

These are not motivational failures. They are ecosystem failures.

That is precisely why the Inclusive Business study must not become another soft conversation about doing good. It should become a rigorous examination of where the Brunei economy quietly excludes the people it publicly claims to be helping.

The financing dimension deserves particular attention.

Inclusive businesses fall into a difficult category. They are not charities, so donations are not their sustainable model. But they are not always attractive to conventional lenders because returns may take longer, collateral may be weak, and impact cannot be captured by profit margins alone. The study's investor questions recognise this tension — asking about the availability of equity, debt, grants, blended finance and venture philanthropy, and whether there is genuine appetite for impact investing in Brunei. They also ask whether government co-investment, first-loss guarantees or tax incentives would change investor behaviour.

This is where Brunei may need to think beyond the instruments it already knows.

Not free money. Not endless grants. But patient capital, co-investment structures, blended finance and performance-based support that rewards genuine impact alongside commercial discipline. The worst outcome would be Inclusive Business becoming another grant-chasing exercise — models that breathe only as long as government support continues and collapse the moment it is withdrawn. The better model is government support designed to help companies build capacity, prove the concept and enter markets on their own terms. That is the difference between a subsidy and a bridge.

There is also the danger of confusing inclusion with low-paid work.

A company should not be praised as inclusive simply because it hires locals for low wages or assigns disadvantaged workers to basic tasks with no career path. Inclusion must mean more than placing people at the bottom of the economy and leaving them there. A genuinely inclusive model should improve income, expand skills, widen market access and build long-term prospects. It should not make poverty more productive for someone else's balance sheet.

This is why impact measurement is not a bureaucratic afterthought. Companies claiming to be inclusive should be asked: who benefited, by how much, for how long, and did the opportunity reduce dependency — or merely manage it more efficiently?

The sectors where Inclusive Business holds real promise in Brunei are not difficult to identify. Agriculture and food production are natural starting points as the country continues to build food security policy. Tourism can accommodate community-based operators, local guides, homestay providers and small food producers — and some are quietly doing this already, without the label. The halal industry creates space for local producers if standards, aggregation and logistics infrastructure are properly managed. The digital economy can reach youth and home-based entrepreneurs if platforms are built with genuine access in mind rather than as an afterthought. Care services, elderly support and community health will grow in importance as demographics shift.

But encouragement alone changes nothing. Each sector needs structure. Small food producers need offtake arrangements and cold-chain logistics. Community tourism operators need reliable visitor flows and real product development. Digital entrepreneurs need actual customers, not just connectivity. And in procurement, large buyers need to stop treating small suppliers as an inconvenience and start investing in them as the future of the supply chain. What the landscape study should surface — and what will matter most — is what is already working, quietly, without formal recognition. Because what already works can be formalised, financed and scaled.

The biggest test may ultimately be cultural.

Brunei is comfortable with welfare. Comfortable with CSR. Comfortable with government-led development as the default mode. Inclusive Business requires something more demanding and less comfortable. It asks government to enable rather than dominate. It asks companies to include rather than merely donate. It asks banks to weigh social outcomes without abandoning financial discipline. It asks MSMEs to professionalise. It asks communities to move from receiving help to building value.

That is a significant shift. It will not be accomplished by one landscape study. But the study can establish honestly where Brunei stands — which sectors are already quietly inclusive, why some models stall, whether financing or procurement access or policy ambiguity is the real bottleneck, and whether the country has the institutional architecture to support what comes after the report is published.

Most importantly, it can help Brunei determine whether Inclusive Business deserves a proper national framework — one with genuine teeth. Recognition or accreditation will carry weight only if tied to real value: procurement access, financing support, mentoring, measurable standards and market visibility. Otherwise it becomes another badge on a company profile, signalling nothing and changing less.

Wawasan Brunei 2035 cannot be carried by government alone. Economic diversification cannot be achieved by declaration. MSMEs cannot be expected to carry the future if they remain disconnected from serious markets. Social protection cannot rely forever on assistance without building pathways to sustained income.

Inclusive Business will not resolve all of these challenges. But it forces the right question: how do we build an economy where growth reaches more people because they are genuinely inside the system — not standing outside, waiting for help to arrive?

Behind the concept are real people. The young graduate who wants to build something but cannot access capital. The single mother trying to turn a real skill into reliable income. The small supplier who cannot break into procurement chains that were never designed to include him. The person with disability who wants work that is meaningful, not merely symbolic. The low-income family that does not want to remain dependent — and should not have to.

If Inclusive Business can bring these people into the real economy, it deserves serious and sustained attention.

But if it becomes only another fashionable term — appearing in strategies, featuring in conferences, and quietly fading from practice — Brunei will have missed the point again.

The country does not need more eloquent language about inclusion. It needs business models that prove inclusion works. And it needs a system prepared to support them when they do.

The landscape is now being mapped.

The harder question is whether Brunei is prepared to change the landscape once the map is drawn.

KopiTalk with MHO  |  kopitalkmho.blogspot.com

He Wrapped The Quran. Then, Continued The Robbery.

He knew how to respect the Quran.

He just forgot how to respect the One it belongs to.

This is the unsettling story of a thief who carefully wrapped the holy book in cloth before continuing his robbery — a small act of reverence in the middle of a greater act of wrongdoing.

But perhaps the story is not really about the thief.

Perhaps it is about us.

About the words we say so often, they no longer reach the heart. About the Bismillah that leaves our mouth before our soul arrives. About the quiet danger of knowing the rules while forgetting what they were meant to awaken inside us.

A reflection on faith, habit, mercy, and the sacred pause we may have lost.

 KOPITALK JIWA

Some of us know all the rules. We just forgot what they were for. 

Decades ago, somewhere in Brunei, a thief broke into a house.

He was good at it. Methodical. He moved through the rooms, picked what he wanted, and left what he did not. When he reached a cabinet, he found a Quran inside.

He did not take it. He did not leave it carelessly on the floor either.

He wrapped it in cloth. Carefully. Set it aside. Then carried on with the robbery.

And if you knew him — if you knew people like him — you might even believe he said Bismillah before he started.

When the police arrived and surveyed the scene, that one detail told them much about the thief. He was a Muslim. He knew he was not in wudhu. He knew touching the Quran in that state was disrespectful — to the book, and to the One it belongs to. So he wrapped it carefully. Set it aside. Then carried on with the robbery.

He knew what was disrespectful.

He had simply lost sight of what respect was meant to lead him to.

 

I have been thinking about that story since Sunday morning.

A small group of us had gathered after Subuh for a taddabur class on Surah Al-Fatiha. Somewhere in the discussion, that incident came up — and it stopped the room. Not because it was shocking. Because it was uncomfortably familiar.

Not the robbery part.

The other part.

The part where a person carries the forms of faith perfectly intact — the knowledge, the vocabulary, the habits — while something essential has quietly gone dark inside.

 

Think about Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim.

You have said it thousands of times. Before eating. Before driving. Before an exam, a meeting, a journey. Maybe you said it before opening this article. Some people — and this is more common than we would like to admit — have even been known to say it before doing something they already know is wrong.

The mouth moves by muscle memory.

The heart has already left the room.

That is not a Gen Z problem. That is not a Gen X problem. That is a human problem, across every generation, in every era. We are creatures of habit. And habit, left unattended, can hollow out even the most sacred words.

 

So what does Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim actually mean?

Break it down slowly, the way it deserves.

Bismillah — In the name of Allah. Not as a password. Not as a good luck charm. As an acknowledgement. As in: whatever I am about to begin, I am beginning it in full awareness of who I am standing before.

Rahman — the mercy that covers everything and everyone, without condition, without application form. The sun rises on the grateful and the ungrateful alike. The rain falls on the good neighbourhood and the bad one. That is Rahman. A mercy so vast it does not wait to be deserved.

Rahim — something closer. More specific. A mercy that attends. That stays near. That sees you not merely as part of the general population of creation, but as you — with your particular mess, your particular hopes, your particular Tuesday morning.

When you say Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim, you are not flicking on a switch. You are saying: I am beginning this in the name of the One whose mercy holds everything in existence, and I am asking to be held by that mercy, right now, in whatever I am about to do.

That is not a small thing to say.

It was never meant to be automatic.

 

Here is the thing about this generation — and in truth, every generation that has learned to recognise performance from sincerity — we are quite good at detecting hollow things.

We can tell when someone is performing. When the words do not match the energy. When something is said because it is expected, not because it is felt. Many young people, especially, have finely tuned sensors for inauthenticity.

Turn that same sensor inward for a moment.

How many times today have you said something — religious or otherwise — that left your mouth before your mind caught up? How many times has Bismillah become the verbal equivalent of a seatbelt click — automatic, unreflective, done because it is what you do before the car moves?

That thief was not a bad Muslim in the cartoon-villain sense. In some ways, he was a very well-trained one. He knew the fiqh. He applied it correctly, even mid-crime. But the living connection to what all of it meant — to who it was all pointing toward — had gone quiet somewhere along the way.

And so he said Bismillah. Broke the door. Wrapped the Quran. Took what he came for.

Every box ticked.

Nobody home.

Faith reduced to compliance is just another set of rules. And rules, without the relationship behind them, become hollow very quickly.

 

I am not asking you to become more religious.

I am asking for something smaller, and perhaps harder than that.

The next time Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim forms in your mouth — before the meal, the drive, the scroll, the decision — let one breath pass first.

Just one.

In that breath, remember: Rahman. The mercy that is already holding you, right now, unrequested and unearned. The fact that your lungs are working, that your mind is reading these words, that you made it to this moment — none of that was guaranteed. All of it is mercy.

Then remember: Rahim. That this is not impersonal. That somewhere in the vastness of creation, there is a mercy that sees you specifically. Not the version of you that is composed and presentable. You, as you actually are.

Then begin whatever you are beginning.

That pause — barely a second — is the difference between reciting and meaning it. Between going through the motions and actually being present for your own life.

 

The thief wrapped the Quran in cloth because he felt, on some level, that it deserved care.

He was not wrong about that. He simply could not see that the same care was owed to the One the Quran belongs to — and that the robbery he was committing was, in its own way, a disrespect far greater than an unwashed hand.

Most of us are not thieves.

But most of us, at some point in the rush of an ordinary day, have said the most extraordinary thing a human being can say — In the name of God, the Entirely Merciful, the Especially Merciful — and meant almost nothing by it.

And still, the Almighty heard us.

Even the hundred times we forgot we were speaking.

 

KopiTalk Jiwa is a column about the quieter things — faith, feeling, and the examined life.

Brunei’s First Spirulina Pilot Project Takes Root in Jalan Jerudong

A small farm. A bigger question.     

By Malai Hassan Othman | KopiTalk with MHO 

 

Last Tuesday morning, in a modest facility at Jalan Jerudong, Brunei took a small but deliberate step into a new corner of the agri-food economy.

 

Barakah Bioindustries Company, or BBIC, held the soft launching of its Spirulina Pilot Project on 28 April 2026 — marking what it describes as Brunei’s first photobioreactor-based spirulina cultivation operation. The event was officiated by Yang Berhormat Awang Zainol bin Haji Mohamed, Member of the Legislative Council, who performed the ribbon-cutting at the pilot site located at No. 15, Simpang 323, Jalan Jerudong. The programme included presentations on spirulina farming and its commercial applications, a live bioreactor demonstration and a discussion session with guests.

 

On the surface, it was a small launch. No grand factory. No large commercial farm. No dramatic announcement.

 

But perhaps that is exactly why the moment matters.

 

In a country where national ambitions are often announced in big halls, under big banners, with big words, this was a quieter kind of beginning — five spirulina photobioreactors assembled at a small site, run by a local company, with the help of Australian technical partners, placed directly within Brunei’s continuing search for food security, economic diversification and practical innovation.

BBIC Managing Director Syed Abdul Hadi was careful not to oversell the moment.

 

“What you see here today is not a grand launch. It is not a factory. It is not a finished product. It is the beginning of something — and that is exactly how we want to present it,” he said in his welcoming speech. “Every meaningful journey begins with a single, deliberate step. And this is ours.”

 

That honesty gave the event its strength.

 

Brunei does not need another polished announcement that disappears after the applause. It needs working examples — however small — of people turning national priorities into something real, testable and expandable.

 

The timing was hard to ignore.

 

Just days before the BBIC launch, Brunei had hosted the 38th FAO Regional Conference for Asia and the Pacific — APRC38 — from 20 to 24 April 2026. It was the first time Brunei hosted the UN regional food and agriculture conference, bringing together ministers and senior officials from 46 nations under the theme “Nurturing Innovation for Agri-Food Systems Transformation.”

 

The message from that conference was unambiguous. Food security is no longer simply about having enough on supermarket shelves. It is about access, nutrition, resilience, local production and regional cooperation. For Brunei — a country where food imports account for more than 90 per cent of consumption and where the food import bill reached BND 686.3 million in 2025 — the question is simple but serious: how much longer can the country talk about food security without building more of its own production capacity?

 

This is where spirulina enters the picture.

 

Spirulina is a blue-green microalgae known for its high protein content and potential use in nutrition, health products and aquaculture feed. In BBIC’s project presentation, spirulina was introduced not only as a health supplement, but as a possible local feed ingredient for hatcheries, fish farms and other aquaculture operations.

 

That matters because much of Brunei’s food and feed system still depends heavily on imports. When prices rise, local producers feel it. When shipments are delayed, small operators absorb the cost. When global supply chains become unstable, countries that cannot produce enough for themselves become exposed. A small spirulina pilot will not solve all that. Nobody should pretend it will. But it points to the kind of thinking Brunei needs more of: produce locally where possible, build technical capability, reduce unnecessary dependence, create new skills, and test new industries before the window narrows.

 

The project investment figure was not disclosed at the launch. What BBIC did disclose is arguably more important: how the investment is being used.

 

The pilot was developed through a Memorandum of Understanding between BBIC and Selvanex Projects of Australia. The Australian team — Dr Ken Street, Mr James Irving and Dr Farouq Sharifpour of the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine, James Cook University — spent the week in Brunei assembling five photobioreactor units alongside the Barakah team, transferring operational knowledge in the process.

Syed Abdul Hadi described the partnership plainly: Barakah and Selvanex were not in a buyer-seller relationship. The Australians did not ship equipment, collect payment and leave. They came to build alongside the local team.

 

“What we are gaining from this partnership is not a product. It is a capability,” he said.

 

That sentence deserves attention. For too long, too many projects in Brunei have been measured by what is bought, installed or launched. Real development is not just about hardware. It is about whether Bruneians learn to operate, maintain, improve, adapt and eventually scale the system themselves. That is the difference between buying technology and acquiring capability.

 

The soft launch brought together representatives from universities, government agencies, business chambers, industry players and community groups. Among those present were Universiti Teknologi Brunei, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Universiti Islam Sultan Sharif Ali, Jabatan Perikanan, the Brunei Economic Development Board, the National Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Malay Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Serikandi Aquaculture, Serikandi Poultry Farm and the Australian High Commission.

 

That mix of attendees was important. Spirulina cannot grow into a serious local industry if it remains inside one small facility in Jalan Jerudong. It needs researchers to study it under Brunei’s tropical conditions. It needs regulators who understand its potential as feed or food. It needs fish farmers and poultry operators willing to test its usefulness. It needs young Bruneians to see it as a skills pathway. It needs business partners who can help turn a pilot into a repeatable model.

 

In BBIC’s project presentation, the site was described as a working learning facility, not a full-scale factory. The immediate task is to test whether spirulina can be grown reliably and affordably under Brunei’s climate, while building standard practices and quality controls. That is the right language. A pilot project should be allowed to be a pilot project — tested, challenged, measured and improved.

 

The danger in Brunei is that too many initiatives are either celebrated too early or abandoned too quietly. What is needed is disciplined follow-through.

 

The road ahead, according to BBIC’s presentation, begins with proving the system at Jalan Jerudong, then expanding with partner farmers, and eventually scaling across Brunei if the model works. That “if” is important.

 

The real test is not whether the launch was successful. It was. The real test is what happens after the chairs are cleared, the guests go home, and the tanks continue running. Can the system produce consistently? Can costs be controlled? Can spirulina be processed to the standard local farms need? Can young Bruneians be drawn into a new kind of agri-tech work? Can universities engage it as research? Can government agencies support it without slowing it with red tape?

 

These are the questions that will determine whether last Tuesday was a pleasant ceremony or the start of something more substantial.

 

For now, what BBIC has done is place a small working example on the table. It is not the whole answer to food security. It is not yet an industry. It is not yet an export story. But it is a visible attempt to respond to a national challenge with action rather than rhetoric.

 

And sometimes, that is where change begins — not with a slogan, but with a working system that people can touch, question, improve and build upon.

 

In a Brunei that often asks what diversification really looks like, the answer may not always begin in a boardroom or a masterplan. Sometimes it begins quietly, last Tuesday morning, beside five green tanks in Jalan Jerudong.

The National Health Check: Brunei's Results Are In

Malai Hassan Othman | KopiTalk with MHO

Sit down. The doctor has gone through every number. And we need to talk honestly.

 

You know that feeling when you walk into the doctor's office, results in hand, hoping for the best but half-expecting to hear something you do not want to hear? That is where Brunei is right now.

 

The Department of Economic Planning and Statistics has published the Brunei Darussalam Key Indicators 2025 — the BDKI — a full annual health check of the nation. Every vital sign measured. Every organ examined. The blood work done. The scan completed. I have gone through it the way a doctor goes through your test results — not looking only for what is reassuring, but for what is real.

 

We now have less than ten years left to reach Wawasan 2035. This is the final lap. And no one should run a final lap without first knowing the true condition of the body carrying them.

 

Your Heart: GDP Growth at 0.7%

 

Brunei's economic heartbeat came in at 0.7 percent in 2025. It is beating — we are not flatlining. But GDP per capita fell from BND 44,996 in 2024 to BND 42,860 in 2025. The country ended the year with less income per person than before.

 

Oil and gas still contributed 46.1 percent of the entire economy. But the non-oil economy — the part Wawasan 2035 was meant to strengthen — contracted 1.5 percent. The private sector contracted 2.1 percent. A heart where one valve does most of the work while the others weaken is a heart under strain it was never designed to carry alone. No nation should arrive at 2035 on artificial support.

 

Your Cholesterol: Oil Dependency

 

The average export price of crude oil was USD 72.33 per barrel in 2025, down from USD 83.85 the year before. Oil and gas revenue fell to BND 2.36 billion — from BND 2.51 billion in 2024 and BND 2.83 billion in 2023. Three years in a row. Consistently falling. FDI came in at BND 219.8 million — positive, but thin, and driven more by debt than by fresh equity confidence. You can live with cholesterol. 

But it catches up. And the longer you wait, the fewer options you have.

 

Your Blood Sugar: The Fiscal Deficit

 

2023 deficit: BND 2.34 billion

2024 deficit: BND 2.75 billion

2025 deficit: BND 3.09 billion

 

The government spent BND 6.43 billion and earned BND 3.34 billion. The gap is BND 3.09 billion — every single year. The damage happens quietly: kidneys strain, circulation weakens, nerves lose sensitivity. And then something that should have healed — does not. The time to address blood sugar is not when the damage is already visible. It is now.

 

Your Lungs: Female Unemployment Rising

 

Overall unemployment rose to 5.2 percent. Male unemployment: 4.2 percent. 

Female unemployment: 6.7 percent — up from 5.6 percent the year before. Female labour force participation fell to 67.2 percent. Our daughters complete their degrees and enter an economy that increasingly cannot place them. This is one lung underperforming. And no nation can run the final lap breathing with one lung.

 

Your Liver: Maintenance Crowding Out Investment

 

Personnel emoluments reached BND 2.31 billion. Recurrent ordinary expenditure: BND 4.86 billion. Development expenditure — money spent on building tomorrow — was BND 324.8 million. For every dollar spent on maintaining what already exists, only seven cents went toward building what needs to exist.

 

Your Kidneys: Food Security Outsourced

 

Food imports in 2025: BND 686.3 million. We import the overwhelming majority of what 458,600 people eat every day. Shipping lanes face geopolitical pressure. Climate events disrupt harvests. Local production is improving — fisheries reached 25,386.5 metric tonnes, rice 2,593.6 metric tonnes — but remains a fraction of national need. Dialysis keeps people alive. But building your own kidney function is what resilience actually looks like.

 

Your Pancreas, Colon & Brain

 

Inflation was -0.3 percent. The Retail Sales Index fell 3.9 percent — third consecutive year of decline. The Services Sales Index fell 7.9 percent. Household spending contracted 1.8 percent. Gross Capital Formation fell 6.0 percent. The economy has lost its appetite and its digestion has slowed.

 

Yet literacy stands at 96.8 percent. 102,880 students are enrolled. Tertiary institutions are producing graduates — qualified, educated, ready. The brain is sending strong signals. But the private sector contracted 2.1 percent, non-oil industries contracted 1.5 percent. The brain is one of Brunei's strongest assets. The problem is the rest of the body has not been built out to match it.

 

The Doctor's Verdict

 

You are not ready for the final lap.

 

The Prescription

 

Free the private sector — genuinely.

 

Every layer of friction discouraging new business, new investment, new industries — identify it, confront it, remove it. The non-oil economy must grow. This is not a preference. It is a survival requirement.

 

Address the fiscal deficit structurally.

 

Not managed year to year — restructured. Development expenditure must take a larger share. Recurrent costs must be honestly reviewed. Oil revenue will not rescue the balance sheet much longer.

 

Open the other lung.

 

Female economic participation is a growth lever, not a social programme. The barriers in hiring, workplace structures, and sector development must be identified and dismantled.

 

Build your own kidneys.

 

Food security is a national security issue. Scale up investment, land policy, research support, and market development with urgency.

 

Feed the pancreas.

 

Stimulate domestic demand. Give small and medium businesses genuine access to financing, markets, and a regulatory environment that does not exhaust them before they can grow.

 

Some people walk out of the clinic, fold the results, and go back to life as it was. But the body keeps its own schedule. If these issues are not addressed before 2035, the year will arrive — as it must — and the story will be the gap between what Wawasan promised and what the nation delivered. Not a collapse. Something quieter: an educated generation without full economic opportunity. A fiscal system stretched thin. A food supply exposed. A private sector still too thin to stand alone.

 

The plan is in the prescription. The warning is written across the numbers. The deadline is 2035 — less than ten years away, with no extensions.

 

The discipline to change before the body forces us to.

 

Malai Hassan Othman is an investigative journalist, political advisor, and policy analyst based in Brunei Darussalam. He writes KopiTalk with MHO at kopitalkmho.blogspot.com and serves as Chairman of the NDP Advisory Board. Data: BDKI 2025, Department of Economic Planning and Statistics, Brunei Darussalam.