KOPITALK WITH MHO  |  Reader Response & Commentary

 

 When a Reader Writes Back:

This Is Exactly the Conversation Brunei Needs.

By Malai Hassan Othman  |  KopiTalk with MHO  |  March 2026  |  In response to DMAO: 'When Budgets Become Projects — But Nation Building Requires Outcomes'

 

 

📱  SOCIAL MEDIA TEASER

A reader read the Day Five LegCo report. Then he sat down and wrote a serious, structured paper in response. That paper asks one uncomfortable question: is Brunei confusing budget administration with nation building? KopiTalk with MHO reads it carefully — and responds.

 

 

 

A reader wrote back.

Not a complaint. Not a compliment. A paper. A serious, structured, uncomfortable paper that took the KopiTalk Day Five LegCo Tracker and asked a question I had been circling for days but had not yet named cleanly: Is Brunei confusing budget administration with nation building?

When I read it, my first thought was — this is exactly the conversation we should be having. My second thought was — I should respond. So here we are.

DMAO — a long-time supporter of this column and someone whose thinking I have come to respect — titled his paper 'When Budgets Become Projects — But Nation Building Requires Outcomes.' He begins with something every engineer, contractor and civil servant will recognise instantly: the project management triangle. A project is considered successful when it is delivered within budget, to specification, and on time. Cost. Specification. Time. Clean. Measurable. Final.

Then he asks the question that makes the triangle uncomfortable: is this how we should be measuring whether a nation is developing?

Because a bridge delivered on time, within budget and to specification is a completed project. But a country with working bridges, employed graduates, food on its own tables and industries that did not exist ten years ago — that is something different. That is a nation that is building itself. And DMAO's point is that we have, over time, become very good at the first thing while remaining less certain about whether we are actually achieving the second.

 

He puts it plainly in the paper itself:

 

"A project can be delivered perfectly and still leave the nation unchanged. Nation building requires something more: institutions that produce outcomes, not just activity." — DMAO, 'When Budgets Become Projects'

 

From there, DMAO proposes three shifts, he says, are necessary to close the gap. The first is cognitive — stop asking only whether the budget was spent properly, and start asking whether the spending changed the future. The second is a priority shift — move from measuring activity to measuring outcomes: jobs created, food produced locally, industries built, young people employed in work that matches what they studied. The third is behavioural — move institutional culture away from defending procedures and toward solving problems together.

And he adds a fourth dimension to the project management triangle: the expansion of national capacity. Not just was the project completed, but did it make the country stronger, more resilient, better prepared for what is coming?

Read it once, and it sounds like good governance theory. Read it twice — against the backdrop of five days of LegCo proceedings — and it sounds uncomfortably accurate.

What I Think About It

DMAO is right. And he is right in an uncomfortable way, which is the best kind of being right.

Sitting through five days of the 22nd LegCo session — reading the Hansard, listening to questions and answers, tracking what was raised and what was revealed — I have been struck by exactly the pattern he describes. The system is articulate about what it has done. It is considerably less articulate about what has changed as a result.

Questions about youth unemployment were answered with information about programmes implemented. Questions about food security were answered with statistics on export growth and infrastructure investment. Questions about inclusive education were answered with counts of institutions, certifications, and training sessions delivered. All of this information is real. None of it is false. But none of it fully answers the question that was actually being asked.

The question being asked is whether something has changed in the life of the person the programme was designed to serve. That question kept getting answered with evidence that the programme exists.

DMAO names this gap with precision. And precision matters, because vague unease about government delivery is easy to dismiss. A clearly articulated framework — cognitive shift, priority shift, behavioural shift — gives the unease a structure that can be engaged with, argued about, tested against evidence, and eventually acted upon.

That is what good public thinking does. It gives language to what people sense but cannot quite articulate. And in doing so, it moves the conversation forward.

Bringing It to Ground

What I want to add to DMAO's framework — as a columnist rather than a policy analyst — is the ground-level texture of what these shifts would actually look like if they happened. Because frameworks are necessary, but they live at an altitude. At some point, they need to come down to street level, kampung level, kitchen table level.

What does the cognitive shift look like at ground level in Brunei today?

It looks like a ministry's annual performance review that leads with the question: how many people found sustainable employment because of what we did this year — not how many workshops we held or how many participants attended.

It looks like a school that measures its inclusive education programme not by the number of Individualised Education Plans filed, but by whether children with special needs are genuinely progressing — and what changes when they are not.

It looks like a food security strategy that is judged not by the kilometres of irrigation built, but by the percentage of Brunei's daily food consumption that is produced on Brunei's soil.

What does the behavioural shift look like at ground level?

It looks like an officer who surfaces a failing programme early, before the money runs out and the results cannot be recovered, and is thanked rather than sidelined for it.

It looks like a ministry that, when a member of the Legislative Council asks a pointed question about outcomes, responds not with a defence of its procedures but with an honest account of what is working, what is not, and what it intends to do differently.

It looks like a culture in which 'we are still gathering data' is understood as the beginning of an answer — not a complete one.

These are not revolutionary demands. They are the reasonable expectations of a patient public, that continues to believe in the potential of its institutions, and that is simply asking those institutions to be as serious about outcomes as they are about procedures.

On Participatory Governance — and Why This Exchange Matters

There is something worth pausing on in the fact that this column is publishing a response to a reader's response to a column.

DMAO did not write to complain. He did not write to flatter. He read a piece of public-interest journalism about the LegCo session, sat with it, and produced a structured, serious, evidence-informed response that extends the conversation into territory the original column did not cover. That is precisely the kind of civic engagement that Brunei's national conversation needs more of.

Participatory governance is a phrase that appears regularly in policy documents. It is often understood as formal consultation — surveys, town halls, structured feedback mechanisms. These are valuable. But participatory governance also happens informally, in the space between a published idea and a citizen who takes it seriously enough to write back.

When a reader engages seriously with public-interest journalism — when they bring their own expertise, their own framework, their own thinking to the conversation and offer it back — that is participation. That is citizenship in action. And this column is genuinely glad to be part of it.

KopiTalk with MHO does not claim to have all the answers. It claims only to ask the questions honestly — and to welcome, with equal honesty, the answers that thoughtful readers bring.

If the 22nd LegCo session has demonstrated anything, it is that Brunei has people — inside the chamber and outside it — who are thinking seriously about the country's future. Members who ask pointed questions. Ministers who respond with increasing frankness. Readers who write papers. Columnists who respond to them.

That is a healthier civic ecosystem than the one we had a decade ago. It is not yet the ecosystem we need. But it is moving in the right direction. And movement in the right direction — even when it is slower than we would like — deserves to be acknowledged.

A Final Word

DMAO ends his paper with a gentle invitation: perhaps this is the conversation we should be having, over kopi.

I accept the invitation. And I extend it to every reader of this column.

Brunei does not have a shortage of plans. It does not have a shortage of intelligent people. It does not have a shortage of commitment among those who serve in its institutions and its public life. What it needs — and what pieces like DMAO's help to build — is a shared language for the gap between what is planned and what is delivered, and a shared culture of honesty about closing it.

The three shifts DMAO describes — cognitive, priority, behavioural — will not happen because a paper was written about them, or because a column responded. They will happen because enough people in enough institutions decide that the old way of measuring success is no longer adequate for the country they want to build.

But conversations like this one are where that decision begins. Over a column. Over a paper. Over kopi.

 

 

 

Editor's Note

KopiTalk with MHO welcomes responses, commentaries and public contributions from readers who engage seriously with the issues raised in this column. The paper by DMAO, 'When Budgets Become Projects — But Nation Building Requires Outcomes,' was written in response to the KopiTalk LegCo Tracker Day Five report of 16 March 2026. It is reproduced and engaged with here in the spirit of open, public-interest discourse.

 

 

 

KopiTalk with MHO  |  Public interest. Plain language. Honest conversation.

What was said, what mattered, and what the public is still waiting for.

Day Five of LegCo: While the World Burns, Brunei Counts Its Budget and Watches Over Its Own.

KOPITALK LEGCO TRACKER | 22nd Legislative Council Session

What was said, what mattered, and what the public is still waiting for.

KopiTalk with MHO • Monday, 16 March 2026 • 22nd LegCo, Day Five

Your son is working in Doha. Your daughter is in Dubai. And on Monday, Brunei's Foreign Affairs Minister stood in the LegCo chamber and said: 760 of our people are in the Middle East. We are watching. We are in contact. Stay vigilant. That sentence landed differently than any budget figure. KopiTalk LegCo Tracker — Day Five.

 

 BND6.3 billion. Say it slowly. That is the national budget Brunei's Legislative Council is deliberating this week — a number large enough to carry ambition, heavy enough to carry responsibility, and specific enough to invite scrutiny.

 

For four days, the chamber has been moving steadily through questions, ministerial explanations and the familiar mechanics of the Supply Bill debate. But on Monday morning, something else entered the chamber. The world did.

 

The Minister of Foreign Affairs II, in his ministerial contribution to the Supply Bill debate, did not confine himself to diplomatic pleasantries. He named a war. He stated Brunei's formal condemnation of military actions by the United States and what he described as the Zionist regime against the Islamic Republic of Iran. He confirmed retaliatory strikes had extended to Iran's neighbours. He told the chamber he had personally called the foreign ministers of seven countries in the days that followed — Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the UAE — to express Brunei's deep concern and solidarity.

 

And then he said the sentence that would have stopped every Bruneian parent, spouse or sibling with a loved one abroad: as of Monday, 760 Bruneian nationals are currently in the Middle East region. They have been advised to remain vigilant and take all necessary precautions. The ministry is monitoring the situation.

 

For the families of those 760 people — workers in the Gulf, students in Jordan, Bruneians on Umrah — that was not a foreign policy statement. That was personal. That was the sound of a government telling its people: we know where your loved ones are, and we are watching.

 

It is the kind of moment that reminds you what a legislature is ultimately for. Not just to debate budgets and policies, but to reassure a nation that its institutions are alert when the world outside becomes uncertain.

 

With that reminder of how quickly global events can reach the lives of ordinary citizens, the chamber returned to its agenda.

 

The rest of Day Five unfolded against that backdrop. A dense Question Time covering thirteen questions, dominated by the Ministry of Education. A budget debate in which three nominated members — with unusual frankness — interrogated the fiscal deficit, the unemployment rate, food security vulnerabilities, and the gap between government spending and public outcomes. Then ministers on their feet after the recess, accounting for their portfolios in a world that is, as one member put it, becoming more challenging by the day.

 

It was a full session. It was also a session that carried weight beyond its agenda — because the world outside the chamber was not waiting politely for proceedings to conclude.

 

WHAT WAS RAISED

 

Four themes carried genuine public weight on Day Five.

 

The fiscal deficit and the falling revenue ceiling.

 

Pengiran Haji Isa bin Pengiran Haji Aliuddin walked the chamber through numbers that deserve wider public attention. Brunei's projected budget deficit for 2026/2027 stands at BND2.72 billion — the gap between BND6.3 billion in expenditure and BND3.53 billion in projected revenue. More troubling is the direction of travel: estimated revenue for 2026/2027 has fallen to BND2.335 billion, down BND414 million from the previous year's revised estimate. Oil and gas revenue has dropped sharply — from BND1.93 billion to BND1.499 billion. Non-oil revenue has also fallen.

 

Brunei is spending more than it earns. And the gap is widening. This is not a new story. But it is a story that cannot be told too often, because it is the economic reality beneath every other conversation in the chamber.

 

Unemployment, skills mismatch, and the gap between education and work.

 

Awang Haji Md. Salleh bin Haji Othman raised what may be the most important number of Day Five: the unemployment rate among residents aged 18 and above has risen to 5.0 per cent in 2025, up from 4.7 per cent in 2024. That may sound like a small movement. It is not.

 

At the same time, around 60 per cent of employers still report difficulty finding and retaining suitable local workers. Unemployment is rising, and employers still cannot find the people they need. Both things are true simultaneously — which means this is not a numbers problem. It is a structural problem. It is a mismatch between what the education system produces and what the economy actually needs. No amount of spending resolves that mismatch unless the two systems are genuinely aligned.

 

Inclusive education: the policy is strong, the review is absent.

 

The Ministry of Education's answers in Question Time were detailed and professionally delivered. Brunei now has 102 institutions providing special needs education support — four Centres of Excellence, nine Model Inclusive Schools, 87 learning assistance centres, and two private schools. Individualised Education Plans are being strengthened. Teacher training is ongoing.

 

But when Dayang Hajah Rosmawatty asked directly whether an independent review exists to assess the effectiveness of the Model Inclusive School and Centre of Excellence model — including teacher-student ratios and economies of scale — the answer was clear: no independent review is currently planned. Internal monitoring will continue.

 

That answer is not wrong. But it is incomplete. A system serving children with special needs, growing in enrolment year by year, deserves to be tested against external benchmarks — not only against its own internal standards.

 

Climate adaptation, coastal erosion, and the urgency of prevention.

 

Awang Haji Mohamad Danial @ Tekpin bin Ya'akub made a case that went beyond environmental policy into something more immediate: the homes of actual people. He drew the chamber's attention to coastal settlements in areas such as Kampung Danau in Tutong District, where residents live with the reality of coastal erosion and wave action — not as a future risk, but as a present one.

 

He noted the BND148.21 million emergency preparedness allocation in the budget and argued that its spirit should extend beyond post-incident response to active prevention: seawalls, coastal protection structures, ecosystem restoration, and regular risk assessments.

 

His core argument was sound — that preventing damage is always cheaper than repairing it. Communities living on exposed coastlines should not have to wait for a disaster before the budget sees them.

 

WHAT THE ANSWERS REVEALED

 

The ministerial responses on Day Five ranged from genuinely informative to diplomatically careful — which is, in this chamber, an honest description of governance under pressure.

 

The Minister of Primary Resources and Tourism delivered one of the stronger performances of the session. International tourist arrivals reached 763,000 in 2025 — a 13 per cent increase over 2024, with cruise ship arrivals growing by 46 per cent. Food export values in the agriculture and agri-food sector rose by 52.4 per cent compared to the previous year. Visit Brunei Year 2027 has been formally set in motion.

 

These are real numbers, and they deserve to be acknowledged.

 

Beyond the immediate anxiety over Bruneians in the Middle East, the Foreign Affairs Minister's contribution mapped a foreign policy landscape that is more turbulent than at any point in recent memory. Russia and Ukraine. Palestine. Great power competition. Trade structure shifts. The weakening of multilateral rules-based order by the very nations that built it.

 

Against all of this, Brunei's response is consistent: dialogue, non-use of force, ASEAN centrality, and support for international law. It is a principled position and it is the right one for a small state.

 

He also confirmed Brunei's role as ASEAN-EU Coordinator through 2027 — a responsibility that will bring the 25th ASEAN-EU Foreign Ministers' Meeting to Brunei in April. For a country of half a million people, that is a meaningful platform. The question is whether Brunei uses it not just to host, but to be heard.

 

But the answer that revealed the most about where the system still has distance to travel came in the cost-of-living exchange. When Awang Lau How Teck asked about the real impact of rising living costs on ordinary people's incomes, the Finance Minister's response was structurally sound — subsidies maintained, minimum wage enforcement, the National Pension Scheme in place, FDI projects expected to generate jobs.

 

All of this is true. But much of the answer was framed in the future tense.

 

The young man at the kitchen table is not living in the future tense. He is living in the present one.

 

The budget is designed well on paper. The question the public is asking is simpler: when does the paper become something they can feel?

 

WHAT THE PUBLIC IS REALLY ASKING

 

• On unemployment at 5.0 per cent and rising: If 60 per cent of employers cannot find suitable local workers, and unemployment is going up at the same time, what exactly is the skills training system producing — and who is held accountable for the mismatch?

 

• On the BND2.72 billion deficit: Brunei has been running deficits for years. The plan is always to close the gap through diversification. When does diversification produce revenue that ordinary people can see reflected in national accounts — not in five years, but in the next budget cycle?

 

• On inclusive education: If enrolment in special needs programmes is growing year by year, and the ministry acknowledges it still needs more qualified teachers, why is an independent review of effectiveness not considered necessary? Who is checking whether what is being done is working well enough for the children it serves?

 

• On coastal communities and climate risk: A family in Kampung Danau whose home sits near an eroding coastline is not asking about carbon neutrality by 2050. They are asking whether anyone will build a seawall before the next storm season. When does climate adaptation policy reach the people it is supposed to protect?

 

• On tourism's 763,000 arrivals: That number is encouraging. But tourists come for experiences, and experiences require trained guides, accessible products, reliable transport, and a hospitality workforce that is ready. How much of the Visit Brunei Year 2027 plan is about marketing, and how much is about ensuring the product is actually ready?

 

THE SIGNAL OF THE DAY

 

The word that kept returning on Day Five — in speeches, in ministerial responses, and in the titah quoted by Pehin Orang Kaya Indera Pahlawan Dato Seri Setia Awang Haji Suyoi bin Haji Osman — was agresif.

 

Aggressive. Be aggressive in attracting investors. Be aggressive in developing agriculture. Be aggressive in supporting local enterprises. Be aggressive in many things.

 

It is the right word. The problem is not the vocabulary. The problem is the machinery.

 

Being aggressive in intention requires a delivery system that can match the pace of the intention. Brunei has, over many years, built excellent plans. It has strategic blueprints, economic roadmaps, manpower frameworks, food industry roadmaps, tourism roadmaps, and climate policies. The plans are not the weakness.

 

The signal from Day Five is this: the chamber is asking the right questions with increasing sophistication. Members are no longer just asking what the government is doing — they are asking whether it is working, who is measuring it, and what happens when it is not. That is healthy. That is what a legislative council exists to do.

 

But the signal also carries a warning. A BND6.3 billion budget is a statement of intent. The public will judge it not by the number, but by whether the system behind the number can move with the urgency the country now needs — for the young man at the kitchen table, for the family on the eroding coastline, for the employer who still cannot find the right worker, and for the child with special needs waiting for a teacher who is qualified to help.

 

On Monday, Brunei's legislature moved through thirteen questions and four major policy speeches with order and professionalism. Ministers responded. Plans were affirmed. Numbers were cited. The chamber did its work.

 

And somewhere outside that chamber, a young man is still at his kitchen table. A family in a coastal village is watching the waterline. A parent of a child with special needs is wondering whether the system sees their child clearly enough to help them properly.

 

Budgets are written in billions. Lives are lived in the singular. The distance between those two things — between the chamber and the kitchen table — is exactly the distance that Wawasan 2035 must close.

 

Day Five reminded us that Brunei knows the direction. The debate in the chamber is becoming more probing, more focused, and more conscious of the gap between policy and delivery.

 

The urgent question now is the speed.

 

KopiTalk LegCo Tracker covers the 22nd Legislative Council session from a public-first perspective. What was said, what mattered, and what the public is still waiting for.

 

Taddabur Surah Al-A’la: Bila Hati Diangkat Semula

KopiTalk Jiwa

Renungan yang menyentuh hati, menggerakkan jiwa dan menginspirasikan hidup.

Oleh Malai Hassan Othman 

 

Pagi itu, apabila Surah Al-A’la disentuh dalam sesi taddabur, yang tinggal dalam fikiran saya bukan sekadar makna ayat-ayatnya, tetapi rasa yang dibawanya. Ada surah yang apabila dibaca, menambahkan ilmu. Ada pula surah yang datang menyentuh bahagian hati yang lama diam, tetapi sebenarnya sudah letih. Bagi saya, Surah Al-A’la hadir dengan cara yang begitu.

 

Surah ini bermula dengan satu seruan yang pendek, tetapi besar maknanya: Sabbihi isma rabbika al-a’la — sucikanlah nama Tuhanmu Yang Maha Tinggi. Sekali pandang, ia seperti satu ajakan untuk bertasbih. Tetapi apabila direnung perlahan-lahan, ayat itu terasa seperti satu teguran lembut kepada jiwa manusia yang terlalu lama sibuk dengan perkara-perkara kecil, hingga terlupa mengangkat semula hati kepada Allah.

 

Begitulah hidup sehari-hari. Kita mudah tenggelam dalam urusan dunia yang tidak pernah habis. Fikiran dipenuhi kerja yang belum selesai, beban keluarga, tekanan mencari rezeki, rasa kecewa, rasa tidak cukup, rasa tidak dihargai. Ada waktunya tubuh berjalan seperti biasa, tetapi hati terasa berat. Dalam keadaan begitu, Surah Al-A’la datang seolah-olah mahu membetulkan semula arah pandangan kita. Seakan-akan ia berbisik: jangan terlalu lama memandang ke bawah. Angkatlah semula hatimu ke atas. Ingat kembali kepada Tuhanmu.

 

Apabila Allah diperkenalkan sebagai Yang Maha Tinggi, saya merasakan surah ini sedang mengajar kita tentang susunan jiwa. Banyak perkara dalam hidup menjadi berat, bukan semestinya kerana masalah itu terlalu besar, tetapi kerana hati kita telah meletakkan masalah lebih tinggi daripada pergantungan kepada Allah. Kita membesarkan kerunsingan, tetapi mengecilkan keyakinan. Kita terlalu sibuk memikirkan apa yang hilang, sampai terlupa siapa yang masih memelihara kita.

 

Ayat-ayat selepas itu membawa kita kepada satu hakikat yang menenangkan: Allah mencipta, menyempurnakan, menentukan dan memberi petunjuk. Ringkas bunyinya, tetapi sangat dalam ertinya. Saya terfikir, betapa banyak masa dalam hidup ini habis kerana kita gelisah tentang perkara yang belum tentu. Kita mahu memahami segala-galanya sekaligus. Kita mahu jalan hidup ini terang dari awal sampai akhir. Sedangkan manusia tidak pernah memegang semua jawapan. Kita hanya berjalan setapak demi setapak.

 

Surah Al-A’la mengingatkan bahawa kita tidak dibiarkan berjalan sendirian. Allah yang mencipta kita lebih mengetahui di mana lemahnya kita, di mana kuatnya kita, di mana kita mudah jatuh, dan di mana kita memerlukan pimpinan-Nya. Kesedaran itu sangat melegakan. Ia melembutkan hati. Tidak semua perkara perlu kita kuasai. Tidak semua beban perlu kita pikul seolah-olah seluruh hidup ini terletak di atas bahu sendiri.

 

Antara gambaran yang paling kuat dalam surah ini ialah tentang tumbuhan yang mula-mula menghijau, kemudian menjadi kering dan kehitaman. Ayat ini terasa sangat dekat dengan hidup manusia. Banyak perkara di dunia pada mulanya tampak segar, indah, memikat, dan sangat penting. Tetapi masa mengajar kita bahawa tidak semua yang bersinar itu kekal. Ada yang kita kejar bersungguh-sungguh, akhirnya hilang nilainya. Ada yang kita sangka akan sentiasa bersama, rupa-rupanya hanya singgah seketika.

 

Barangkali di situlah letaknya salah satu pengajaran halus Surah Al-A’la. Dunia ini ada tempatnya, tetapi jangan sampai ia mengambil seluruh ruang dalam hati. Kita tetap perlu bekerja, berusaha, mencari nafkah dan memikul amanah hidup. Namun dunia jangan dibiarkan berakar terlalu dalam di jiwa. Bila hati terlalu terikat kepada yang sementara, ia mudah rapuh apabila sesuatu berubah. Sedangkan hidup ini memang tidak pernah kekal dalam satu rupa.

 

Yang juga sangat menyentuh saya ialah bagaimana surah ini membezakan antara orang yang menerima peringatan dengan orang yang berpaling daripadanya. Di situ saya terdiam sejenak. Kerana kadang-kadang kita suka mendengar peringatan, tetapi belum tentu benar-benar mahu berubah. Kita mungkin mendengar ayat yang sama berkali-kali, namun hati kita masih juga di tempat lama. Mungkin masalahnya bukan pada kurangnya ilmu. Mungkin masalahnya ialah hati yang terlalu penuh dengan diri sendiri.

 

Di situlah saya merasakan pentingnya pesan tentang membersihkan jiwa. Surah Al-A’la menyebut bahawa berjayalah orang yang mensucikan diri. Itu satu ukuran kejayaan yang sangat berbeza daripada ukuran dunia. Dunia sering mengajar bahawa kejayaan itu terletak pada apa yang kita miliki, apa yang kita capai, atau bagaimana orang memandang kita. Tetapi surah ini membawa kita pulang kepada satu soalan yang lebih sunyi: bagaimana sebenarnya keadaan hati kita?

 

Masihkah hati itu lembut? Masihkah ia mudah menerima nasihat? Masihkah ia malu apabila berbuat salah? Masihkah ia rindu untuk mendekati Al-Quran? Atau hati itu sudah terlalu letih, terlalu keras, terlalu sibuk dengan dunia, hingga tidak lagi terasa apa-apa?

 

Saya rasa itulah antara pengajaran yang paling dekat daripada taddabur Surah Al-A’la. Bahawa hidup ini bukan sekadar bergerak laju, tetapi memastikan arahnya betul. Kita boleh kelihatan sibuk, tetapi kosong. Kita boleh kelihatan berjaya, tetapi jauh. Kita boleh kelihatan tenang di luar, tetapi kusut di dalam. Surah ini seperti mengajak kita berhenti sejenak lalu bertanya: ke manakah sebenarnya hati ini sedang dibawa?

 

Dalam taddabur itu juga disentuh tentang pentingnya hubungan dengan Al-Quran. Bagi saya, ini juga satu teguran halus kepada diri sendiri. Kita selalu berkata mahu hati tenang, mahu fikiran jernih, mahu hidup lebih teratur. Tetapi sejauh mana Al-Quran benar-benar hadir dalam perjalanan harian kita? Bukan sekadar dibaca apabila ada waktu, tetapi didekati sebagai cahaya. Kadang-kadang kita mencari terlalu banyak jawapan di luar, sedangkan panduan yang paling benar sudah lama ada di depan mata, cuma kita belum benar-benar rapat dengannya.

 

Surah Al-A’la tidak datang dengan nada yang keras, tetapi kesannya dalam. Ia tidak menjerit kepada manusia. Ia seperti mengangkat manusia perlahan-lahan keluar daripada kelalaian. Ia mengingatkan bahawa ada hidup yang lebih besar daripada apa yang sedang kita kejar sekarang. Ada akhirat yang lebih baik dan lebih kekal. Dalam dunia yang begitu mudah membuat manusia lupa, peringatan seperti ini terasa amat berharga.

 

Bagi saya, pengajaran paling besar daripada taddabur Surah Al-A’la ialah ini: manusia mudah menjadi kecil apabila terlalu lama hidup dalam dunia yang kecil. Kita sibuk dengan urusan harian, terperangkap dalam letih sendiri, runsing tentang nasib, kecewa dengan manusia, gelisah tentang masa depan. Lalu kita terlupa bahawa kita mempunyai Tuhan Yang Maha Tinggi, yang mencipta, menyusun, memimpin dan mengetahui segala yang tersembunyi di dalam dada.

 

Mungkin sebab itu surah ini terasa begitu menenangkan. Ia tidak menjanjikan hidup tanpa ujian. Tetapi ia membetulkan tempat sandaran hati. Dan kadang-kadang, itu sahaja sudah cukup untuk membuat seseorang terus kuat melangkah.

 

Akhirnya, taddabur Surah Al-A’la bagi saya bukan sekadar memahami makna ayat. Ia seperti satu ajakan untuk menyusun semula hidup dari dalam. Supaya hati tidak terlalu dipenuhi dunia. Supaya jiwa tidak terlalu jauh daripada Al-Quran. Supaya diri ini sentiasa ingat bahawa kejayaan sebenar bukan pada apa yang kita kumpul di luar, tetapi pada apa yang berjaya kita bersihkan di dalam.

 

Dan mungkin itulah juga take away yang paling jujur. Dalam hidup yang sering menarik kita ke bawah, Surah Al-A’la datang untuk mengangkat semula pandangan hati ke atas. Mengangkatnya daripada gelisah kepada tawakal, daripada lalai kepada ingatan, daripada sibuk yang memenatkan kepada sedar yang menenangkan. Kerana apabila hati sudah kenal semula tempat sandarannya, hidup mungkin masih penuh ujian, tetapi jiwa tidak lagi mudah rebah. (MHO/03?2026)

 

Day Four of LegCo: Brunei Doesn’t Have a Planning Problem. It Has a Delivery Problem.

KOPITALK LEGCO TRACKER | 22nd Legislative Council Session

 

What was said, what mattered, and what the public is still waiting for.

 

Behind the broad support for a BND6.3 billion budget, one uncomfortable truth kept surfacing: Brunei does not have a shortage of plans. It has a shortage of delivery.

KopiTalk with MHO • Sunday, 15 March 2026 • 22nd LegCo, Day Four

Picture a young Bruneian woman. She has a Master’s degree. She has been applying for jobs for two years. She runs small deliveries on the side to help her parents pay the bills, but no bank will give her a loan to grow that small business because what she does is still not treated as formal employment. She is not lazy. She is not choosy. She is simply living in a system that has not fully caught up with how people actually work — or how desperately they need to. 

 

She was not in the chamber on Sunday. But she was the reason the chamber’s best moments mattered.

 

Day Four of the 22nd Legislative Council session opened with Question Time and moved into the policy debate on the Supply Bill and Development Fund for 2026/2027. Every member who spoke supported the BND6.3 billion budget. But the support came with conditions — and those conditions said more about where Brunei really stands in the final stretch towards Wawasan 2035.

 

WHAT WAS RAISED

 

Four issues carried genuine public weight on Day Four.

 

Youth unemployment and the gig economy.

 
The youth unemployment rate climbed to 18.3 per cent in 2024, up from 16.8 per cent the year before. Haji Salleh Bostaman noted something more telling than the statistic itself: births registered in Brunei fell from 6,500 in 2020 to 5,360 in 2024 — a drop of more than 1,100 children in four years. Young couples are not just struggling to find work. Many are postponing family plans because they do not feel secure enough about the future.

 

Project delivery under RKN12.

 
Of 305 development projects under the 12th National Development Plan, 91 remain in the design phase. Dayang Hajah Rosmawatty pushed for quarterly national-level monitoring, early warning systems for delays, and the willingness to reprioritise projects that are no longer earning their allocation. The development fund, she argued, is not merely government expenditure. It is a national investment. The standard should be higher.

 

Civil service transformation.

 
The Public Service Transformation Committee, JTPA, is still gathering data on current-state gaps before moving to actual intervention. The framework sounds right. But gathering data is not the same as moving. With eight years left before 2035, the pace of institutional reform is itself a public-interest issue.

 

Food and energy resilience.

 
Haji Salleh Bostaman raised geopolitical supply-chain disruption and a recent water supply failure caused by a landslide as reminders that Brunei remains exposed. In a country that imports more than 90 per cent of its food, the question of strategic stockpiles is not academic. It is about what happens to ordinary families when the next disruption arrives.

 

WHAT THE ANSWERS REVEALED

 

The government’s responses on Day Four were, for the most part, detailed and professionally delivered. The Minister of Transport and Info communications gave a thorough account of Muara Port’s expansion — capacity set to double to 500,000 TEUs by Q3 2027, new shipping lines established, and the Navigating 2030 strategic plan launched. The Minister of Finance and Economy II defended the currency arrangement with confidence and cited inflation below one per cent annually across four decades as evidence of monetary stability.

 

But on the questions that cut closest to daily life, the answers were thinner.

 

On gig workers and bank access, the reply was polite but thin. Encouragement, subject to employers, is not yet a real policy answer. For many young people already working on the margins, the system still asks them to be entrepreneurial without fully recognising them as economic actors. Nothing said on Sunday clearly changed that.

 

On civil service transformation, the message was even clearer: the machinery is still diagnosing itself. But with 2035 drawing closer, diagnosis alone no longer feels like progress.

 

On the 3,000 new jobs expected from 18 incoming FDI projects, the announcement was welcomed by every speaker. But welcomed with a harder question: what is being done right now to prepare local workers not only for entry-level roles, but for supervisory, mid-management, and eventually board-level positions? One member raised that concern directly. The Hansard records no clear answer.

 

WHAT THE PUBLIC IS REALLY ASKING

 

On the budget deficit: the Fiscal Consolidation Programme is now in its second iteration. When does consolidation produce something the public can actually feel — not another plan to reduce the deficit, but a visible reduction?

 

On youth unemployment: an 18.3 per cent youth unemployment rate is not just a trend to monitor. It is someone’s son or daughter, educated and willing, still waiting. When does the system absorb them?

 

On gig work and financing: why is a young Bruneian who works every day, pays for his or her own equipment, and contributes to the economy still half-visible to the banking system? How long will the country ask its young people to be entrepreneurial while refusing to treat too many of them as entrepreneurs?

 

On RKN12 projects: 91 projects are still in the design phase. Who is watching the clock? And if a project is running late, who is accountable — not just responsible, but accountable?

 

On the birth rate: when young couples decide not to have children because they are unsure they can afford to, that is not merely a demographic statistic. It is a quiet verdict on the economy.

 

THE SIGNAL OF THE DAY

 

The word that defined Day Four was bersama — together. The budget theme is Bersama Menjayakan Wawasan Brunei 2035. It is a good word. It carries the right spirit.

 

But bersama only works when every part of the system is actually moving and not drafting, and not studying and not gathering data. Moving.

 

The speeches in the chamber were, on balance, the best kind: honest, measured, constructive, and grounded in what people outside the chamber are actually experiencing. Members did not silence the budget with flattery. They asked it to prove itself.

 

That is healthy. That is what a legislative council is for.

 

What comes next — in project approvals, in gig-worker financing, in job placement, in the confidence of young couples deciding whether they can afford a future here — will determine whether Day Four’s questions were truly heard, or merely recorded.

 

The public does not live in the Hansard. It lives in the outcome.

 

And that is where Wawasan 2035 will ultimately be judged — not in this chamber, but in the lives of people still waiting for the system to move at the speed their situation demands.

 

KopiTalk LegCo Tracker covers the 22nd Legislative Council session from a public-first perspective: what was said, what mattered, and what the public is still waiting for. (MHO/03/2026)