THE UNFINISHED AGENDA

For six decades, Brunei has studied its economic challenges, commissioned reports and refined strategies. Perhaps the greatest obstacle was never a lack of ideas, but a habit of delaying action. At what point does another diagnosis become an excuse? And when do we finally begin the treatment? #KopiTalk

Part 4: The Habit We Must Break

The problem was never the diagnosis. It was always the treatment.

By Malai Hassan Othman

I remember the confidence.

Not the buildings. Not the contracts. Not the ceremonies.

The confidence.

In the years after independence, there was a quality in the air difficult to describe to anyone who did not feel it. A sense that Brunei was finally the author of its own story. That the men and women of this nation — our architects, our engineers, our entrepreneurs — would build what independence had promised. Not just politically. Economically. On our own soil, with our own hands, for our own people.

We were jealous of that aspiration.

Jealous in the right sense. Protective. Fierce about it. Unwilling to let it go.

The pioneers proved it was possible. Arkitek Ibrahim. Arkitek Idris. The engineers and quantity surveyors who walked away from secure government careers because they believed a newly independent nation needed more than capable administrators.

It needed captains of industry.

And for a while, we were building them.

DMAO spent decades watching what happened next.

A former Permanent Secretary who served across the Ministry of Industry and Primary Resources, the Ministry of Development and the Ministry of Communications — and later as Director of the Civil Service Institute — he observed the system from the inside across the very decades this series has been examining. He watched the plans arrive. He watched the recommendations accumulate. He watched the institutions respond.

And recently, in a paper written this year, he gave the pattern its name.

Dengar cerita… tunggu data.

Four words of Malay that say what sixty years of English-language policy documents could not quite land.

We hear the story. We feel the concern. We register the problem.

And then we wait for more data.

Not from bad faith. Not from indifference. But from a habit so deeply embedded in our institutional culture that it feels like prudence — like due diligence — when it is actually avoidance dressed in the language of process.

Dengar cerita… tunggu data.

That phrase will stay with this series because it names, with painful precision, the habit that may have cost us most.

The scale of that cost is measurable.

Economic diversification has been a stated goal of national policy since the Second National Development Plan of 1962 to 1966.

Not 1984. Not Wawasan 2035.

1962.

In 1995, the Manchester Business School produced recommendations. In 1997, the Ministry of Industry and Primary Resources produced its own. In 1999, the Brunei Darussalam Economic Council warned of fundamental problems threatening prosperity and stability. In 2001, the National Development Committee added its voice. In 2003, the Monitor Group was commissioned to examine the same ground again.

Five major studies in eight years.

All well-formulated. All with specific, actionable recommendations. All broadly pointing in the same direction.

In 2004, Haji Razali bin Haji Johari stood before the National Day Majlis Ilmu and called for an Anjakan Paradigma.

In 2007, Manu Bhaskaran of the Centennial Group was commissioned by CSPS to examine why, despite much effort and competent governance, diversification had not succeeded. His finding was precise and uncomfortable.

The problem was not the plans.

The plans were good.

The problem was the enabling environment. The habits. The incentives. The institutional conditions that determined whether good plans became lasting change.

In 2016, the DPPMB 3rd World Café found that only 3 per cent of development project allocations reached genuine local companies, when 40 per cent was the threshold needed for meaningful local business development.

That recommendation is still waiting.

And in 2026, DMAO — who watched much of this from inside the machinery — documented the recurring habits of national execution failure.

Dengar cerita… tunggu data.

The diagnosis has never been the problem.

We are — and have always been — extraordinarily good at diagnoses.

What we have struggled with is treatment.

And Mu’aqabah — genuine self-correction, not regret, not another consultation, not another plan — begins with naming honestly what has resisted treatment for so long.

So let us name it.

The first habit is analysis paralysis.

The system already knows the problems.

Youth unemployment. SME fragility. The procurement gap between what local companies receive and what they need to build genuine enterprise. The commercial space occupied by others because local capacity did not grow fast enough to fill it.

These are not new discoveries. They have been documented, discussed and acknowledged across six decades of national development planning.

Yet the institutional reflex remains familiar: study further, refine the finding, validate again, commission another review before beginning treatment.

There is a difference between caution and avoidance.

Caution is appropriate when the facts are unclear.

When the facts have been established repeatedly across decades, caution becomes something else.

It becomes a habit.

Dengar cerita… tunggu data.

The second habit is the institutional illusion.

A system can run programmes, spend budgets, produce reports — and still fail to change outcomes.

We have agencies. Enterprise development frameworks. Training programmes. Funding schemes. Procurement policies. Strategic plans. We have, by any institutional measure, the architecture of a nation serious about economic development.

And yet the commercial landscape remains substantially familiar.

Ali Baba. Ali Chandran. Ali Bangla.

The same patterns that troubled us twenty years ago trouble us today. The same questions Lord Joe raised in 2004 are being raised again in 2026.

The institutional illusion is the belief that activity is the same as change. That a programme launched is a problem addressed. That a budget spent is an outcome achieved.

It is not.

When we measure success by workshops conducted rather than enterprises that survived, we are measuring the wrong thing. When we report the number of youths trained rather than the number employed and earning a sustainable income, we are confusing motion with progress.

Mu’aqabah does not accept it.

It asks one question only:

What actually changed?

The third habit is compliance without amanah.

In a system that rewards procedure and penalises risk, the rational individual choice is to follow the process, complete the task, submit the report — and leave the outcome to someone else.

Not my scope.

No instruction yet.

This is not always a moral failure. Often, it is a rational response to a system that has not made outcome accountability the condition of professional standing.

But collectively, it is devastating.

When no one owns the outcome — when responsibility is distributed across committees, agencies and leadership transitions — good ideas die quietly. Not because anyone decided to kill them. Because no one was accountable for keeping them alive.

The World Café documented this with uncomfortable clarity. Initiatives stalled not because the ideas lacked merit but because continuity was lost. A new leader arrived. Priorities shifted. Institutional memory faded. The programme that was gaining traction quietly disappeared.

Knowledge without action changes very little.

But action without continuity is little better.

Amanah — genuine, trust-driven accountability for outcomes rather than mere compliance with procedure — is what the system has been missing.

It is not only a management concept.

It is a moral one.

The 5M framework reminds us of this:

Mu’ahadah as covenant,

Mujahadah as striving,

Muraqabah as awareness,

Muhasabah as self-reckoning, and

Mu’aqabah as self-correction.

Mu’aqabah demands more than recognising what went wrong.

It demands correction.

These are not system errors.

They are system habits.

Errors can be corrected by fixing a process.

Habits require something harder — sustained cultural change that persists across leadership transitions, budget cycles and the institutional pressure to return to the comfortable rhythm of diagnoses and delay.

That is what makes Mu’aqabah at the national level so difficult.

And so necessary.

Because the numbers are no longer abstract.

Oil revenue in 2025 stood at BND 2.36 billion — and falling. The fiscal deficit reached BND 3.09 billion. The cushion that made urgency invisible for four decades is thinning in real time.

For a generation, oil wealth funded our civil service, subsidised our living costs and made economic urgency feel optional. Enterprise seemed unnecessary when security was available without it. Risk seemed irrational when comfort was guaranteed without it.

Bhaskaran identified this in 2007: the prevalence of government employment and subsidies creates incentives that do not propel workers to strive, compete and build.

He was not criticising Bruneians.

He was describing the rational response of an intelligent people to the incentive structure that oil wealth created.

But that incentive structure is changing.

The urgency that was invisible in 1990 is now visible whether we choose to see it or not.

This is not yet a crisis.

It is an opportunity.

The moment when Mu’aqabah shifts from morally right to economically necessary.

So what does genuine self-correction look like?

Not a new plan. The plans are not the problem.

Not a new agency. The agencies exist.

Not another consultation. The consultations have been thorough, the recommendations specific, the findings consistent across six decades.

Genuine self-correction means three things.

First, measure outcomes, not outputs.

Every enterprise development programme must be evaluated not by the number of participants but by the number of sustainable businesses it produced. Not by workshops conducted but by income generated. Not by budget spent but by economic sovereignty advanced.

If a procurement policy is designed to deliver 40 per cent of project value to local companies and delivers 3 per cent, that is not partial success.

It is measurable failure.

And it must be named clearly.

Second, build institutions that outlast the people who run them.

Every initiative must have a handover protocol. Every programme must have documented commitments that survive leadership transitions. Every accepted recommendation must have a named owner — not a committee, not a shared responsibility — one person whose accountability is tied to the outcome.

The ecosystem the pioneer generation began — financing, mentorship, procurement discipline, cooperative structures, patient capital — was never completed not because it was impossible, but because institutional continuity was never built around it.

Continuity is not an administrative detail.

It is the difference between a plan and a transformation.

Third, change the signal sent to the next generation.

Every family that steers a capable child toward government employment rather than enterprise is making a choice. Every school that produces administrators rather than builders is making a choice. Every institution that honours the graduate who joins the civil service but not the one who risks everything to build a business is making a choice.

Mu’aqabah asks for a different choice.

Not because government employment is wrong.

But because a nation that channels all its talent into administration and too little into enterprise will always find that the commercial life of its towns belongs to someone else.

The signal sent to the next generation may be the most important reform available.

It costs nothing to change.

And everything follows from it.

The pioneers of the 1980s did not wait for the enabling environment to be perfect.

They stepped forward and helped build it themselves.

They understood something that six decades of studies, consultations and strategic plans have documented but not yet delivered at scale — that economic sovereignty is not merely a policy outcome.

It is a cultural achievement.

Built enterprise by enterprise, family by family, generation by generation, by people who have decided that the economy of their nation belongs to them in practice, not only in principle.

Mu’aqabah does not ask whether we understand this.

The record — from 1962 to 2026 — shows that we do.

It asks whether we are finally prepared to act on it.

Not another study.

Not another plan.

Not another consultation whose recommendations wait nine more years beside the ones that came before.

For sixty years, Brunei has studied the road ahead.

We have commissioned reports.

We have gathered experts.

We have written strategies.

We have diagnosed the illness with remarkable consistency.

Mu’aqabah asks only one question.

When do we finally begin the treatment?

KopiTalk with MHO  •  The Unfinished Agenda  •  Part 4 of 5

Read here for:

Part 1: Twenty-Two Years Later

Part 2: Anjakan Paradigma

Part 3: The Mirror We Must Face

THE UNFINISHED AGENDA

Political independence gave us a nation. Economic sovereignty requires something more: builders, institutions and the courage to produce each new generation. Before asking who occupies our economy today, perhaps we should first ask ourselves what we stopped building yesterday. #KopiTalk

Part 3: The Mirror We Must Face

We once produced builders. The harder question is whether we built enough successors.

(Read here for Part1: The Unfinished Agenda and Part 2: Anjakan Paradigma

By Malai Hassan Othman

There was a time when Brunei spoke confidently about producing Bumiputera entrepreneurs as captains of industry.

It was more than a slogan.

It was a national aspiration.

The idea appeared in our development planning and reflected the optimism of a young nation that had just reclaimed full independence. Political sovereignty had been achieved. The next ambition was equally clear — Bruneians would become the architects, engineers, contractors and business leaders responsible for building their own country’s future.

For a while, that ambition seemed well within reach.

Many of the pioneers came from government service.

Architects left the Public Works Department. Engineers, quantity surveyors, land surveyors and technical officers walked away from secure careers that most people would have been reluctant to leave. They exchanged certainty for risk because they believed a newly independent nation needed more than a capable government.

It needed capable local enterprises too.

The emergence of firms such as Arkitek Ibrahim, Arkitek Idris and other pioneering Bumiputera professional practices was not an accident. They became part of a generation that helped design the buildings, roads, housing estates and public infrastructure that still serve this country today.

They demonstrated that Bruneians were capable not only of administering development, but of leading it.

As a young draftsman, I had the privilege of seeing part of that generation from close quarters. What impressed me most was not the buildings themselves.

It was the confidence.

There was a quiet belief that Bruneians could build their own nation with their own hands, their own knowledge and their own professional pride.

That confidence deserves to be remembered.

Not because the past was perfect.

But because it proved something important.

Brunei has never lacked talent.

And then?

That is where the mirror begins.

The story of Brunei’s economic life since independence is not only a story of what was built. It is also a story of what was not built — the spaces left open, the arrangements that became normalised, the gap between political sovereignty and economic dignity that has remained more visible than many would like to admit.

We know the names.

Ali Baba. Ali Chandran. Ali Bangla.

They are not really about ethnicity. They describe three structural patterns that have quietly shaped our commercial landscape across four decades. And muhasabah requires that we look at each one honestly — not to assign blame, but because patterns that are never named cannot be corrected.

Ali Baba is the arrangement most Bruneians recognise but few discuss openly.

The licence is Bruneian. The letterhead is Bruneian. The name on the contract is Bruneian.

But the capital, the expertise, the day-to-day operation and — in many cases — the profit belong elsewhere. The Bruneian name provides access. The foreign partner provides much of what is required to execute the work.

The consequence is measurable.

The DPPMB 3rd World Café — held in 2016, the third in a series of national consultations — found that under the Ministry of Development’s procurement structure, only 3 per cent of development project allocations reached Class I, II and III Bruneian companies. The recommended threshold for meaningful local business development was 40 per cent.

That was nine years ago.

The recommendation is still waiting.

The contract goes out.

The Bruneian name is on it.

Three per cent arrives.

That number does not describe foreigners taking what is ours.

It describes a system we built — one that too often rewards access over ability, connections over competence, and the appearance of local ownership over its substance.

Ali Chandran requires a different kind of honesty.

Walk through the commercial districts of Bandar Seri Begawan. Through Kiulap. Through Gadong. Through the older shophouse rows that have served this city for generations.

Look at who opens early.

Who closes last.

Who has built, patiently and quietly over decades, a commercial presence that is now structural — in retail, provision, small manufacturing and the daily economic texture of every neighbourhood.

South Asian enterprise has occupied a commercial middle ground that local enterprise largely left available.

This is not said in resentment.

These are people who identified opportunity, accepted risk, managed costs and remained disciplined through difficult years.

They did what entrepreneurs do.

The question muhasabah asks is not about them.

It asks about the space they occupy.

Brunei’s retail sector alone was valued at around BND 448 million in the first quarter of 2024. It touches every Bruneian family every single day. Yet local ownership and genuine local operation remain, by most honest assessments, the exception rather than the norm.

Part of the explanation is structural. Private domestic consumption contributes only around 17 per cent of Brunei’s GDP — compared to approximately 50 per cent in larger economies such as China. Our economy has long been sustained by government expenditure and hydrocarbon revenue. The commercial middle ground did not fill itself.

It was left open.

And others, to their credit, filled it.

The mirror does not ask why they came.

It asks why we left the space.

Ali Bangla completes the picture at the ground level.

Industry data has consistently shown that construction, logistics, retail support and domestic services remain heavily dependent on migrant labour.

The familiar response is that Bruneians do not want these jobs.

That may be partly true.

But it is not the whole answer.

And muhasabah does not accept half-answers.

The private-sector wage structure often makes these roles genuinely unattractive. Government employment offers greater security and, in a small society where failure is highly visible, represents the rational choice for many young Bruneians.

The migrant worker did not displace the Bruneian worker.

The conditions that would have made those roles attractive and sustainable for Bruneians were never sufficiently built.

Taken together, these three patterns tell a single story.

Not a story about foreigners.

A story about choices.

Choices made by individuals, institutions and a culture that — perhaps understandably, cushioned by oil wealth — did not always treat commercial discipline and economic ownership as urgent national priorities.

And choices made by governments that sometimes allowed good ideas to lose momentum when leadership changed.

The same DPPMB World Café highlighted another uncomfortable reality: initiatives often stalled not because the ideas lacked merit, but because continuity was lost. Leadership changed. Priorities shifted. Institutional memory faded. Programmes that had begun to gain traction quietly disappeared.

Knowledge without action changes very little.

But action without continuity is little better.

This is where the dignity argument becomes impossible to avoid.

When a Bruneian entrepreneur cannot secure a primary contract without another party carrying much of the commercial capability — what does that say about the maturity of our own ecosystem?

When a young Bruneian walks through the commercial heart of his own city and quietly feels that the most economically visible participants are not his own people — what does that do to his belief in what is possible?

These are not rhetorical questions.

They are questions a nation serious about economic sovereignty must be willing to ask — not in anger, not in self-pity, but with the honesty that muhasabah demands.

The pioneers understood that.

They did not wait for the ecosystem to be perfect.

They stepped forward and helped build parts of it themselves.

What muhasabah reveals is not that we lack their ability.

It reveals that, over four decades, we made choices that did not always put that ability to work in our own long-term economic interest.

The ecosystem they began — financing, mentorship, procurement discipline, cooperatives, patient capital and institutional continuity — was never fully completed.

An ecosystem that remains incomplete cannot fully deliver the economic sovereignty that political independence envisioned.

That remains the unfinished work.

Economic sovereignty is not achieved by declaration.

It is built through people.

One architect.

One engineer.

One contractor.

One shop owner.

One cooperative.

One institution.

One generation willing to prepare the next.

The mirror does not lie.

It shows us an economy that is politically ours but not yet fully shaped by our own economic strength.

It shows us a commercial landscape shaped as much by what we failed to build as by what others patiently built for themselves.

It shows us the distance between the nation we declared ourselves to be in 1984 and the economic capability we still need to deepen today.

That distance is not fixed.

It is not permanent.

It is not beyond correction.

But it cannot be corrected until it is honestly seen.

That is what this mirror is for.

KopiTalk with MHO  •  The Unfinished Agenda  •  Part 3 of 5

THE UNFINISHED AGENDA Part 2: Anjakan Paradigma

Twenty-two years ago, Brunei recognised that political independence was only the beginning. The harder journey was building economic strength through discipline, institutions and a change in mindset. Today, as Wawasan Brunei 2035 draws nearer, perhaps the real question is not what we planned—but whether we truly walked the path we chose. #KopiTalk

The hardest transformation is not changing policies. It is changing the way we think.

Read here for Part 1: The Unfinished Agenda

By Malai Hassan Othman

There is a difference between recognising a problem and allowing that recognition to transform us.

The first requires awareness.

The second requires courage.

Twenty-two years ago, Haji Razali bin Haji Johari—better known to many in Brunei’s business community as Lord Joe—stood before Brunei’s National Day Majlis Ilmu and called for what he described as an Anjakan Paradigma—a paradigm shift. It was not a passing remark buried in an academic paper. It was one of the central ideas presented at a gathering held to mark two decades of Brunei’s independence, as the nation reflected not only on what it had achieved but also on what it still hoped to become.

And Brunei had achieved something real.

Twenty years of independence. Political sovereignty restored. A nation governed by its own people, under its own flag, guided by its own faith and values. That is no small achievement. By any regional measure, it was a remarkable milestone—one that deserves to be acknowledged before anything else is said.

But Lord Joe was not speaking about what had been achieved.

He was speaking about what had not.

Because political sovereignty, however hard-won, is only the first half of independence.

The second half—economic sovereignty—is a different matter entirely.

And it was that second half that Lord Joe was asking us to think about differently.

Walk through the commercial heart of any Bruneian town today.

Look at who runs the shops.

Look at who holds the contracts—and who does the actual work behind them.

Look at who builds wealth quietly, year after year, within an economy whose sovereignty is undeniably our own.

Then ask yourself an honest question.

Does this economy reflect the aspirations of independence we celebrated two decades ago?

That unease has a name.

It is not jealousy.

It is not resentment looking for a target.

It is something more fundamental—the quiet but persistent feeling that political sovereignty and economic dignity are not yet the same thing.

That we have won the right to govern ourselves without yet fully winning the right to shape our own economic destiny.

That is the feeling Anjakan Paradigma was meant to address.

Not through blame.

Not through protectionism dressed up as policy.

But through a genuine shift in how we think about enterprise, discipline, ownership and responsibility.

“Paradigm shift” has since become part of our everyday vocabulary.

We invoke it in speeches.

We repeat it in seminars.

We insert it into strategic plans and conference themes.

Yet phrases have a habit of becoming comfortable.

The more often they are repeated, the less they disturb us.

Perhaps that is the first lesson hidden inside Lord Joe’s paper.

Anjakan Paradigma was never meant to be a slogan.

It was an invitation to muhasabah.

Not to ask who was responsible for our shortcomings.

But to ask whether we ourselves were prepared to think differently about enterprise, leadership, discipline and responsibility.

That distinction matters.

Because self-reflection is often misunderstood.

It is not an exercise in assigning blame.

It is the courage to ask whether tomorrow will truly be better than today because we were willing to change ourselves today.

A familiar reminder in the Islamic tradition teaches that a person is at a loss if tomorrow is no better than today—and in deeper loss if today is worse than yesterday.

Tomorrow must genuinely be better.

But improvement does not come from recognition alone.

It demands disciplined effort, perseverance and the sincerity to see change through.

Perhaps that is why Lord Joe’s paper still feels relevant today.

Not because Brunei failed to recognise the challenges facing local entrepreneurship.

Part 1 showed that the diagnosis was already on the table in 2004.

The more uncomfortable question is whether recognising the diagnosis was mistaken for completing the treatment.

There is an old saying that knowledge without action changes very little.

History suggests that nations are no different.

Brunei has never lacked plans.

It has never lacked aspirations.

Nor has it lacked thoughtful people willing to ask difficult questions.

The real test has always come afterwards.

Can good ideas become lasting institutions?

Can strategies become habits?

Can policies become culture?

Can a people move from holding a licence to genuinely owning an enterprise—and from owning an enterprise to building an economy that reflects their dignity as the rightful stakeholders in their own nation’s future?

Those are far harder transformations than drafting another report or launching another programme.

That is why the call for an Anjakan Paradigma still echoes twenty-two years later.

Not because it was ignored.

But because paradigm shifts are measured not by the speeches that introduce them, but by the behaviours they leave behind.

The essays that follow this one will examine that gap honestly.

They will look at the patterns that have emerged in Brunei’s commercial life—the arrangements that have allowed others to prosper in our economy while local enterprise often remained fragmented. They will ask difficult questions, not to assign blame, but because muhasabah demands that we see ourselves clearly before we can change.

Perhaps that is where we must begin.

Not with the comforting question of whether we recognised the problem.

The record shows that we did.

But with the more demanding question that mujahadah asks of every individual—and perhaps every nation.

Did we strive with the sincerity the task required?

Or did we become satisfied with the appearance of effort—the seminars attended, the reports submitted, the strategies launched—while the harder work of genuine transformation remained unfinished?

Imam Al-Qushairi observed that the soul is often held back by two tendencies: surrendering to desire and resisting obedience even when the right path is already known.

Building character, he reminded us, is far more difficult than performing acts of devotion.

So too with nations.

Recognising the need for an Anjakan Paradigma was only the beginning of the journey.

The question this series will continue to ask is both simpler and more demanding.

History has already recorded what we hoped to become.

The years ahead will record whether we became it.

Did we actually walk?

KopiTalk with MHO  •  The Unfinished Agenda  •  Part 2 of 5

The Unfinished Agenda

Part 1: Twenty-Two Years Later

When Brunei celebrated two decades of independence, it asked whether political sovereignty would be matched by economic strength. Twenty-two years later, that question still deserves an answer.

By Malai Hassan Othman

There are moments in a nation’s history when celebration gives way to reflection. Brunei was in that mood in 2004.

The country was commemorating twenty years as a fully sovereign and independent nation after decades under British protection. Patriotism was at its height. The excitement of independence was still fresh, and the language of nation-building carried enormous emotional weight. The question was no longer whether Brunei could govern itself. It was how Bruneians would shape the nation’s future.

It was therefore no coincidence that, alongside the official celebrations, the National Day Committee organised a Majlis Ilmu under the theme:

“Patriotisme Teras Keteguhan Negara – 20 Tahun Merdeka: Pencapaian dan Halatuju.”

The theme was more than ceremonial.

It acknowledged something the official celebrations preferred not to dwell on: political sovereignty alone would never be enough. A sovereign nation also needed citizens capable of building its economy, creating enterprises and sustaining prosperity for future generations.

Among the papers presented at that Majlis Ilmu was one whose title now feels remarkably contemporary:

“Masalah, Pencapaian dan Prospek Perniagaan Orang Melayu.”

Presented by Haji Razali bin Haji Johari on behalf of the Dewan Perniagaan dan Perusahaan Melayu Brunei (DPPMB), the paper examined the strengths, weaknesses and future of Malay entrepreneurship at a defining moment in Brunei’s national journey.

Looking back today, the paper produces an uncomfortable feeling.

Not because it was wrong.

But because it still feels current.

Twenty-two years have passed, development plans have come and gone, strategies have been launched, entrepreneurship programmes have multiplied.

Yet many of the questions raised at that Majlis Ilmu continue to surface today, as though time itself had been busy while the conversation stood remarkably still.

Its significance lies not in predicting the future.

It lies in recognising, at a very early stage, that political sovereignty and economic capability are not the same achievement.

In 2004, the public conversation centred on what was commonly known as the Ali Baba phenomenon—arrangements in which business licences granted to local citizens were effectively operated by others.

The expressions Ali Chandran and Ali Bangla had not yet entered Brunei’s vocabulary.

Yet the underlying concern was already unmistakable.

How could Bruneians, particularly Malay entrepreneurs, build the knowledge, institutions, commercial discipline and business culture needed to become stronger participants in their own economy?

That question was never directed against any particular community.

It was directed at ourselves.

One of the central themes of Haji Razali’s presentation was the need for an Anjakan Paradigma—a paradigm shift. Entrepreneurship, he argued, required more than licences, financial assistance or good intentions. It demanded stronger institutions, better governance, commercial knowledge, leadership and a willingness to think beyond survival towards sustainability and growth.

The recommendations were neither hidden nor controversial.

They were presented at one of the nation’s most significant intellectual forums during one of the most symbolic moments in Brunei’s post-independence history.

Like many thoughtful ideas, however, they proved easier to applaud than to implement.

That observation is not intended as criticism.

It is simply what history appears to tell us.

Over the past few weeks, Brunei has once again found itself discussing local economic participation.

The names are now different.

Ali Chandran. Ali Bangla.

Social media has amplified concerns that once travelled only through coffee shops and neighbourhood conversations.

But beneath the changing labels lies a remarkably familiar question.

Why does this debate keep returning?

Perhaps because the conversation itself never truly ended. It merely changed its vocabulary.

Fifteen years after Haji Razali’s presentation, research by Li Li Pang of Universiti Brunei Darussalam documented what became known as the Ali Chandran phenomenon, examining how expatriate business networks had become increasingly visible within Brunei’s retail sector. Rather than contradicting the concerns raised in 2004, the study found that many of the same structural questions surrounding local entrepreneurship had simply waited.

In late 2024, this column compared the two works and reached an uncomfortable conclusion: despite being separated by fifteen years, they pointed towards many of the same structural challenges confronting local enterprise.

Today, in 2026, public attention has shifted again.

The debate now revolves around Ali Bangla.

The labels have changed.

The questions have not.

This series is not an attempt to reopen old controversies.

Nor is it an exercise in assigning blame.

It is an invitation to revisit a national conversation that Brunei itself began more than two decades ago.

A conversation about what economic participation should mean in an independent nation.

A conversation about how local entrepreneurship can become more resilient, more organised and more competitive.

A conversation that may be more relevant today than when it first began.

History is valuable not because it tells us what happened.

It is valuable because it reminds us of the questions we once considered important enough to ask.

Perhaps the real question is not whether Brunei recognised the problem in 2004.

The record shows that it did.

The more uncomfortable question is what happened after the applause ended, the seminar hall emptied, and the papers were filed away.

That is the conversation this series hopes to reopen.

In the next part, we return to Haji Razali’s call for an Anjakan Paradigma and examine the distance between policy ambition and institutional follow-through.

The record suggests Brunei was more practised at holding the conversation than at sustaining what came after it.

The Name Was Never the Problem

For years, we argued over the names—Ali Baba, Ali Chandran, Ali Bangla. But what if the names were never the real story? This concluding essay asks a harder question: did we lose ground because others were stronger, or because we never built the institutions, ecosystems and discipline needed to compete ourselves?

KopiTalk with MHO

June 2026

Part 5 of the KopiTalk series on local economic participation in Brunei

From Ali Baba to Ali Chandran to Ali Bangla — the name has changed three times. The question underneath it has not moved an inch.

By Malai Hassan Othman

When this series began, Brunei was in the middle of another familiar cycle.

A viral complaint.

A new name.

A round of outrage on WhatsApp and TikTok.

Fingers pointing at foreign-run shops, foreign workers, foreign operators quietly building networks in spaces that local enterprise had left vacant.

The name this time was Ali Bangla.

But the name was never the problem.

It was never Ali Baba either.

Or Ali Chandran.

The name is what we reach for when we are not ready to say what we actually mean.

What we actually mean is this: Brunei has watched others organise inside its own market — systematically, patiently, effectively — while local economic participation has remained fragmented, cautious, and too often dependent on government support rather than commercial discipline.

That is not a complaint about foreigners.

It is a description of a structural failure that belongs to us.

Five parts.

One argument.

Part 1 named the pattern — how the same complaint has resurfaced under different names across decades, and why the name change is not the story. The story is why the system keeps producing the same outcome.

Part 2 explained the mechanics — how what looks like a shopfront is often the visible tip of a supply chain, and how the real competition is not between individual operators but between organised ecosystems and isolated individuals.

Part 3 placed the responsibility — who wrote the policy, who runs the system, who issued the licences, who rented them out, who chose the foreign stall over the local one. One finger pointed outward. Three pointed back.

Part 4 asked the harder question — so what do we build? And answered it: purchasing alliances, cooperative structures with commercial discipline, commercial spaces designed for small local businesses, financing pools, and a fundamental shift in what we count as progress. Not licences. Businesses that last.

Part 5 closes the circle.

Everything this series has examined — retail, food and beverage, construction, commercial property — tells the same story from a different angle.

In retail, the organised network survives on margins that would close an isolated shop.

In construction, the visible subcontractor is often the front of a labour, hardware and transport chain that stretches far beyond the project site.

In commercial property, shophouse lots in some of Brunei’s newer developments have been priced at levels that price out the local entrepreneur before they even open the door. When commercial space costs what it costs, and when banks will only lend against a leasehold with sufficient years remaining, the local operator starting alone is already at a structural disadvantage before the competition begins.

The pattern is the same in every sector.

The organised network absorbs cost, shock and risk across the chain.

The isolated individual absorbs it alone — and often closes.

This is not a coincidence.

It is what happens when a market is left to fill itself without a deliberate strategy to build local economic ecosystems alongside it.

The series has also been honest about something more uncomfortable than the structural failure.

The local licence holder who rents out his licence is not a victim. He made a calculation — that passive income is safer and easier than building a business. He was right, given the conditions. But the conditions were shaped by a policy environment that rewarded nominal ownership over active enterprise, that measured licences issued rather than businesses built, and that never asked, year after year, how many of those registered enterprises were actually running.

The local consumer who queues at the foreign stall is not disloyal. She made a calculation — that the price was better, the service more consistent, the product more reliably available. She was right, given what was on offer. But the offer was shaped by a market where organised operators had built the supply chain to compete on price and consistency, and where local enterprise had not yet organised itself to match.

The local contractor who hires foreign labour is not unpatriotic. He made a calculation — that the workers were more available, more willing, and often less expensive. He was right, given the labour market. But the labour market was shaped by decades of discouraging locals from entering certain trades, by a culture that associated certain work with status rather than skill, and by an education system that pointed everyone toward a desk job and called it aspiration.

In every case, the individual made a rational decision.

In every case, the system made that decision rational.

That is the reckoning the series has been building toward.

Not blame.

Not anger.

A clear-eyed look at how a system produces outcomes, and what it would take to produce different ones.

The regional lesson is worth repeating one final time, plainly.

Indonesia’s Benteng Policy gave preferential licences to indigenous citizens to build a merchant class. It produced rent-seekers, not entrepreneurs. It was abolished as a failure.

Malaysia’s affirmative action policy gave preferential treatment in contracts, equity and licensing. It helped some. It did not build a commercially disciplined entrepreneurial class. Decades later, the same conversation continues.

Singapore faced the same structural weaknesses in its Malay-Muslim business community and chose a different path — consolidation, professionalisation, shared infrastructure, institutions capable of competing at scale.

Brunei has had all three case studies available.

The question has never been whether we knew.

It has always been whether we were honest enough — and organised enough — to act.

So where does this leave us?

Not in despair.

The argument of this series has never been that Brunei cannot build a stronger local economic ecosystem. It has been that Brunei has not yet organised itself seriously enough to do it.

That is a different problem.

It has a different solution.

The solution is not a new policy name.

It is not another entrepreneurship programme.

It is not a crackdown on foreign shopfronts that leaves the underlying conditions unchanged.

It is local supply chains with local hands at every link.

Cooperatives governed like businesses, not committees.

Commercial spaces affordable enough for a local entrepreneur to survive long enough to become competitive.

Financing that reaches the people who need it.

KPIs that measure whether businesses lasted, not whether licences were issued.

And it is the consumer who chooses local — not out of guilt, but because local enterprise has organised itself well enough to deserve the choice.

The man in Muara who started with a barber shop understood something simple.

You do not wait for a policy to build an ecosystem.

You start with what you have.

You learn the trade.

You add one business.

Then another.

Then another.

One decade at a time.

That method is not foreign.

It is not complicated.

It is not beyond Brunei.

It just requires something that no policy document can mandate and no enforcement agency can deliver:

The decision to stop pointing at the name — and start building the thing.

The pattern is known.

The responsibility is ours.

The blueprint already exists.

The only remaining question is whether we are finally prepared to use it.

KopiTalk with MHO  •  Malai Hassan Othman

Substack: kopitalkwithmho.substack.com  •  LinkedIn: Distribution

Concluding part of the five-part KopiTalk series on local economic participation in Brunei.