Day Nine: Feedback Is a Gift. So, Why Is No One Opening It?

KOPITALK LEGCO TRACKER  |  22nd Legislative Council Session

 

 

 

Day Nine: Feedback Is a Gift.

So, Why Is No One Opening It?

KopiTalk with MHO  •  Wednesday, 25 March 2026  •  22nd LegCo, Day Nine  |  Morning and Afternoon Sessions

 

 

She visited the rice farmers. She sat with them. She listened. They told her exactly what is wrong — and exactly what would help fix it. She brought those words into the chamber and called them what they are: a gift. Day Nine of LegCo. The nation has a plan for almost everything. The question is whether it is listening to the people already doing the work.

 

 

 

She did not send a survey. She did not wait for a report. She went to the fields.

 

Dayang Hajah Rosmawatty binti Haji Abdul Mumin visited rice farmers across Brunei Muara, Tutong, and Belait. She sat with them and held a dialogue. She came back with their words in her hands — not as statistics, but as the practical things they told her needed fixing. Then she brought those words into the Legislative Council chamber and ended her contribution with a line that deserves to sit near the centre of this entire session:

 

Feedback is a gift.

 

Three words. But they carry the weight of nine days of debate.

 

Because this session has spent nine days and a BND6.3 billion budget discussing what the country needs. And again and again, the people who know the answer most clearly are not always the ministers in the chamber. They are the farmers in the fields, the parents managing school runs alone, the families in Temburong driving past the one EV charging station that only works if you own the right brand of car. They are already giving their feedback — in their choices, their struggles, and their workarounds. The question is whether the system is treating it like the gift it says it is.

 

Day Nine was the first sitting after Hari Raya. The Yang Di-Pertua opened with a call for semangat berkobar-kobar — a burning spirit — to finish the work ahead. The session covered two ministries in Question Time and four in the Committee Stage across morning and afternoon sittings. It was dense, detailed, and at times candid in ways that earlier days were not. And woven through all of it was a single question that kept returning in different forms:

 

who is the system actually built for?

 

What Was Raised

 

The farmers who are already doing it right — and what they need

 

Brunei imports over 90 per cent of its rice. That figure alone should concentrate minds. And it has — the national rice self-sufficiency rate has improved from 4.7 per cent in 2017 to around 8 per cent in 2024. That improvement did not come from a policy document. It came from farmers who showed up, planted, and delivered. The top 20 farmers are earning between BND200,000 and close to BND1 million a year. The model works when it is properly supported.

 

But here is the paradox Rosmawatty brought into the chamber. The rice production project under the national development plan has a planned allocation of BND1.82 million. In the last financial year, only BND36,000 of that was spent.

 

That is not a rounding error.

 

That is a food security project running at about two per cent of its intended budget.

 

And when she sat with the farmers and asked them what they needed, they did not ask for grand policy changes. They asked for three things.

 

— More certified seed suppliers — right now, there are only three in the entire country, and supply is not enough to meet the programme's targets.

 

— More field visits from ministry officials — not inspections, but genuine engagement, where someone comes and listens to what is working and what is not.

 

— Stronger field leadership, so farmers at the grassroots level have a coordinator who can help solve problems without waiting months for a response.

 

These are not impossible things to provide. They do not require a new law or a major policy redesign.

 

They require attention.

 

Now place that alongside this: the government is preparing for Visit Brunei Year 2027 with a tourism budget that has nearly doubled from BND1.9 million to BND3.9 million. There is a task force for education tourism. A visit to Singapore is planned within two weeks to discuss bringing students here. Dedicated marketing pushes into North America, Europe, and the Middle East are underway. Health tourism packages are being developed with JPMC. Islamic tourism packages are already in motion.

 

None of that is wrong. Tourism matters. Economic diversification is urgent.

 

But the contrast is difficult to ignore.

 

Big ambitions tend to attract budgets, task forces, and movement.

 

The farmer growing rice to feed the country is still waiting on three seed suppliers and a project barely moving on paper.

 

The nation says food security is a priority.

 

The budget, at least for now, suggests a different tempo.

 

 

The model works when it is properly supported. The question is why support seems to arrive faster for large, visible initiatives than for the people already growing the food.

 

The child left between noon and five o'clock

 

Awang Amran bin Haji Maidin raised something on Day Nine that every working parent in Brunei will recognise immediately.

 

Current regulations only allow registered daycare centres to accept children up to three years old. Kindergarten runs half a day. That leaves a gap — children aged three to five who are too old for registered daycare but too young for a full school day. Working parents, particularly those without family nearby to help, are filling that gap with informal arrangements.

 

Here is the irony.

 

The regulation was designed to protect children. But in practice, it is pushing families toward arrangements that may offer less protection, not more. Because a registered, supervised daycare centre — the kind with trained staff, safety standards, and government oversight — cannot legally take their child. So they find someone who can. And that someone operates outside any regulatory framework at all.

 

Amran asked for the policy to be reviewed. He suggested a new category — after-school care for children aged four to six, with clear safety standards and supervision requirements.

 

It is a practical, common-sense solution.

 

The answer, however, did not yet offer the clarity many parents would have hoped for.

 

And so, for now, the parents are still the ones solving it.

 

One charging station. One brand. One resort.

 

Brunei has approximately 2,000 PHEV and EV vehicles registered as of January 2026. There are 40 charging stations and 45 charging points across the country. The transition to electric vehicles is real, and the numbers are growing.

 

In Temburong — the district the government is actively developing as an eco-tourism destination, the district connected to the mainland by a BND1.6 billion bridge — there is one EV charging station. It is at The Abode Resort and Spa. It only works for specific vehicle brands.

 

That is not a small detail.

 

That is the gap between a national ambition and the infrastructure that makes it usable.

 

If you drive to Temburong in an EV that is not the right brand, you are effectively on your own.

 

The minister acknowledged this and said more chargers will come as usage grows. That is probably true. But usage usually grows when infrastructure exists — not only after it does.

 

The digital ambition — and what sits underneath it

 

Day Nine's Question Time was almost entirely about digital transformation.

 

Public service satisfaction is at 84.4 per cent. Online service satisfaction at 79.2 per cent. Instagram reach for religious content increased elevenfold in a single year. A locally-built Brunei game, Tikus Tales, won silver at the ASEAN Digital Awards 2025. The e-sports team won seven medals, including gold at SUKMA 2024. The GenAI handbook for education was launched in September 2025. Sixty-six religious services have been mapped for digitisation.

 

Taken at face value, it is the picture of a country moving steadily into a digital future.

 

But the same sitting also heard a member raise the fact that the digital signatures law has a section — Part 10, governing Certification Authorities — that has not yet been enforced. The e-stamping system has been running since December 2022, but business processes at the land department and court registry still require people to show up at a counter.

 

And across the Committee Stage, the pattern that has run through this session kept reappearing:

 

The system is increasingly good at launching, mapping, and measuring activity.

 

It is still working on measuring whether that activity has meaningfully changed daily life.

 

That is not a dismissal of the effort. The effort is real and visible.

 

It is a question about what the numbers are actually measuring.

 

84.4 per cent customer satisfaction in a public service survey is a meaningful figure. But it sits alongside a rice project running at two per cent of its allocation and a childcare gap that working parents are solving informally.

 

The digital infrastructure is growing.

 

The question is whether it is reaching the people who need it most.

 

What the Answers Revealed

 

Day Nine had a different quality to its answers than the pre-Raya sittings. Ministers were more relaxed. Some exchanges had genuine warmth. The Yang Di-Pertua's remark at the opening — that he hoped members would return with a burning spirit — set a tone that held through most of the day.

 

The Primary Resources and Tourism Minister was candid about the export initiative. Twenty-nine companies have registered interest in exporting to Singapore. The domestic market is limited — the minister said so plainly.

 

But the feedback from the farming dialogue raised something the answer did not fully settle: you cannot export at scale if you cannot first grow at scale. And you cannot grow at scale if your seed supply is bottlenecked at three certified suppliers.

 

The Development Minister was honest about the limits of the chamber as a venue for certain kinds of questions. He endorsed the Yang Di-Pertua's gentle redirect to members who raised very specific local infrastructure issues — flood drainage in Tutong, water supply gaps in Brunei Muara — suggesting these are often better pursued through district offices and direct ministerial channels than through a budget committee sitting.

 

That is fair.

 

But it also points to a structural reality: the people most affected by these issues often do not know those channels exist, or do not feel confident using them. The chamber remains the one place where they know their representative is being heard.

 

The Religious Affairs Minister's response to halal certification deserves attention. There are tens of thousands of pending halal certification applications. The minister acknowledged this. A member proposed a dedicated halal authority to help clear the backlog and position Brunei more competitively in a global halal market worth between USD2.3 and USD2.8 trillion.

The idea is not new.

 

But the scale of the opportunity — and the scale of the backlog — are both growing. The distance between them is not closing fast enough.

 

The Culture, Youth and Sports Minister's response to the PKBN youth programme was one of the most direct of the day. Pehin Suyoi suggested extending the programme to job-seeking graduates as a structured six-month bridge — not just patriotism and character, but targeted skills, digital literacy, industry exposure, and mentorship.

 

The minister welcomed the idea but noted the cost is BND3,500 per participant.

 

That is not a small amount.

 

But it is also considerably less than the cost of a graduate who stays unemployed for another year.

 

What the Public Is Really Asking

 

— For the rice farmer: the feedback has been given. The seeds are insufficient, the visits are too rare, and the field coordination is weak. These are solvable problems. When will they be solved?

 

— For the working parent: the childcare gap is not a new discovery. Parents have been solving it informally for years, often in ways that offer their children less protection than a registered centre would. What is the timeline for a policy review?

 

— For the EV driver in Temburong: the bridge cost BND1.6 billion. The charging infrastructure was not integrated in any meaningful way. When investment and daily usability are this far apart, what is the coordination mechanism meant to close that gap?

 

— For the halal entrepreneur: the global halal market is worth trillions. Brunei's certification is internationally respected. But the backlog is tens of thousands of applications deep. Every month that passes is a month of lost opportunity.

 

— For the young person waiting for a job: the PKBN costs BND3,500 per participant to run a programme that, by the minister's own account, produces measurable, employer-confirmed improvements in attitude, discipline, and work readiness. Why is the programme not bigger?

 

The Signal of the Day

 

Day Nine was the day the session came back from Hari Raya and found the same questions still waiting.

 

Not because nothing had been done.

 

But because the work that matters most — the slow, consistent, field-level work of listening and responding — does not pause for public holidays.

 

The paradox Rosmawatty surfaced is this:

 

The country's food security strategy depends on farmers.

 

Not on investors, not on task forces, not on marketing campaigns — but on the people who wake up and plant things.

 

And those people are already giving the system clear, specific, actionable feedback about what they need to do more of — and what they are already doing well. The top 20 are earning up to a million ringgit a year. The model is proven. The bottlenecks are known.

 

Meanwhile, a tourism budget nearly doubles. A team flies to Singapore within two weeks. New markets are being opened in Europe and North America. These things are not wrong. They are exactly what economic diversification looks like in motion.

 

But the contrast reveals something real about how urgency is often allocated.

 

Large, visible, internationally-facing initiatives tend to move quickly.

 

Small, domestic, ground-level needs — three more certified seed suppliers, a policy update for childcare, a working charger in Temburong — often wait in a queue that seems to have no visible front.

 

DMAO has been asking across this entire session: who is still responsible after the answer is given?

 

Day Nine offers a sharper version of that question.

 

Not just who is responsible —

but who is listening?

 

Not only to the questions in the chamber,

but to the answers that are already out there — in the fields, in the homes, in the car that parks at Temburong's one charging station and finds it does not work for them.

 

The feedback is being given. Every day.

 

By the farmers who grow food.

 

By the parents who patch together childcare.

 

By the drivers navigating roads and systems not yet built for how people actually live.

 

Whether it is received as a gift — that is the measure of what this session will have been worth.

 

 

 

The session continues Thursday, 26 March 2026, at 9.00am.

 

The rice is still growing.

The feedback is still waiting.

The gift is still on the table.

 

And the real test is no longer whether the country knows what needs fixing.

It is whether the system is willing to keep saying feedback is valuable — while leaving so much of it unopened.

 

 

 

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.