Kopi Talk with MHO

  

KOPITALK WITH MHO

Column by Malai Hassan Othman

FOLLOW-UP  |  Continuation of “Whose Festival Is It, Anyway?”

 

 

The Chamber Has Spoken. Now What?

 

This column is the third in a series. The first, “Brunei’s Consumer Fairs: A Cash Surge—But Who Really Wins?”, was published in 2025. The second, “Whose Festival Is It, Anyway?”, appeared earlier this month. Both examined how local vendors are being crowded out of Brunei’s seasonal consumer fairs and trade expos. Since that second piece was published, the issue has entered the Legislative Council chamber. The street has been saying it for months. The numbers have been pointing in the same direction. Now the chamber has said it out loud. The only thing missing is the government’s response.

 

Bandar Seri Begawan  |  March 2026

 

 

Editor's Note: This is the third column in a series on Brunei’s seasonal consumer fairs. The first, “Brunei’s Consumer Fairs: A Cash Surge—But Who Really Wins?”, was published in 2025 and examined where the money goes during the festive season. The second, “Whose Festival Is It, Anyway?”, published earlier this month, looked at how local vendors are being crowded out of trade expos and bazaars by outside traders. Since that piece appeared, the issue has entered the Legislative Council chamber, new ground-level testimony has emerged from Kuala Belait, and a separate but related concern about halal compliance has been raised by members of the public. This column addresses all three.

 

Ask any local trader how the last festive season went, and give them a moment before you expect an answer.

 

Because it is not a simple one.

 

The tents go up. The crowds come. The money moves.

 

And then, when it is all over and the stalls are packed away, too many of them are left with the same quiet question — was any of that really meant for us?

 

That question has been circulating in WhatsApp groups, in coffee shop conversations, in messages sent to this column. And on the 20th of March, it finally found its way into the Legislative Council chamber, where Yang Berhormat Pengiran Haji Isa bin Pengiran Haji Aliuddin said plainly what many had been saying privately: expo and bazaar organisers must involve local companies.

 

Pelita Brunei carried the headline. The words are now on the record.

 

So the question shifts. Not whether the problem exists — it does. The question now is what happens next.

 

What People Are Actually Saying

 

One message shared with this column captures it as well as anything. An upcoming event in Kuala Belait this April — and we are talking about April, weeks from now — has already allocated around 95 percent of its stalls to vendors from outside. Local traders who applied were told the space was full. When they dug a little deeper, they found that the space was indeed full — just not with them.

 

This is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern. And it is getting harder to explain away.

 

There is also a question that keeps coming up in these conversations, one that nobody in authority seems to want to answer directly: are some of these vendors entering Brunei on tourist visas to trade? Because if they are, that is not a grey area or an ambiguity in the rules. That is a hole in the system, and it is being used.

 

Visitors on tourist visas are not permitted to conduct commercial activity. If seasonal expos and bazaars have quietly become a route through which short-term traders operate outside proper commercial documentation, that is a matter for the immigration and trade authorities — not as a political complaint, but as a straightforward question of whether the rules apply equally to everyone.

 

 What the Numbers Say

 

This column has previously examined retail sales data from the Department of Economic Planning and Statistics. It is worth revisiting.

In Q2 of 2021, when borders were closed and foreign vendors could not enter, retail sales in Brunei reached BND488.2 million — the highest figure in recent years. The borders reopened. The trend reversed. By Q2 2025, the number had dropped to BND394.7 million. That is the lowest in at least eight years. It is below pre-pandemic levels.

 

That is not a fluctuation.

 

That is a direction.

 

The relationship is not perfectly linear, and this column is not claiming it is. But when what the data shows lines up consistently with what traders on the ground are experiencing, it becomes difficult to look away.

 

The festive season matters here because of what is at stake. The Kurnia Peribadi alone puts over BND17 million into people's hands in the weeks before Hari Raya. That money is meant to move through the local economy. When a large portion of it flows straight out — into the hands of vendors who will be gone by the time the celebrations are over — the intended effect gets diluted.

 

The Halal Question That Cannot Be Left Unanswered

 

Of everything raised with this column, this is the one that requires the most care — and the most clarity.

 

People have been asking whether halal standards at these seasonal events are being applied with the same rigour as they are everywhere else in Brunei. The concern is specific: that food vendors at certain expos and bazaars appear to operate without the certification that any permanent food establishment would be required to hold. 

 

That oversight — the spot checks, the verification of ingredients, the independence of halal supervisors — seems, to those who have observed it, to relax during these events in a way it does not relax at other times of year.

 

If that observation is accurate, it is not a minor administrative inconsistency. Halal compliance in Brunei is not a preference. It is not a recommendation. It is a religious and constitutional commitment, and it does not carry an exemption clause for the duration of a trade expo.

 

The same standard that applies to a hotel kitchen, a roadside stall, or a school canteen applies to a tent at a festive bazaar. That standard does not pause because the event is only five days long. It does not bend because a vendor has come from far away and the logistics are complicated.

 

MUIB holds the mandate and the responsibility for ensuring halal integrity across Brunei. If seasonal commercial events are currently operating in a grey zone — where the rules exist but the enforcement is inconsistent — that grey zone needs to close.

 

Not quietly.

 

And not gradually.

 

Now.

 

The public has asked this question openly. It deserves an equally open answer.

 

The Accountability Gap

 

Here is the practical problem. When you ask which ministry or agency is responsible for ensuring that commercial expos involve local traders fairly, the answer is not obvious. Is it the Ministry of Finance and Economy? The Ministry of Home Affairs? The immigration department? The industry associations?

 

The honest answer is probably: all of them, and none of them clearly enough.

 

Issues that stretch across departments tend to belong to nobody in particular. And when nobody owns a problem, the problem tends to stay exactly where it is.

 

What is needed is not another study or another committee. It is a clear policy position — one with a name attached to it and a timeline behind it — that says: commercial events held in Brunei, using Brunei's venues and Brunei's festive calendar to attract Brunei's consumers, must give meaningful space to Brunei's traders. Not a token booth in the corner. Meaningful space.

 

And it should say clearly that those who come here to trade must do so on the proper terms — documented, certified, and compliant in every way that local businesses are required to be.

 

The Proverb Has Not Changed

 

There is an old Malay saying that this column has used before, and it fits too well to leave out.

 

Kera di hutan disusui, anak di rumah mati kelaparan.

 

The monkey in the jungle is fed, while the child at home goes hungry.

 

It is a hard image. But the hardness is not manufactured — it comes from watching a slow drift in a system that was built to protect something, and has simply not kept pace with what it set out to do.

 

The local traders who have written to this column are not asking for special treatment. They are not anti-competition or anti-foreign. They are people who chose to stay, to invest here, to pay their licences and their taxes and their staff, year after year. They are asking for one thing: a fair chance at their own festive season.

 

And they are asking something that every Muslim consumer in Brunei has the right to ask — that when they buy food at a bazaar in this country, they can trust that it meets the same standard they expect everywhere else.

 

LegCo has spoken.

 

The street has spoken.

 

The numbers have spoken.

 

The question now is simple.

 

Will the system respond — or will the tents go up again, and nothing change?

 

 

 

KopiTalk with MHO

Public Interest Column  |  March 2026