So What Do We Build?

Part 4 of the KopiTalk series on local economic participation in Brunei

Read here for Part 1: The Same Question, Asked Again, Part 2: Why Do Others Build Ecosystems While We Build Shops? and Part 3: Three Fingers Pointing Back

A man in Muara started with a barber shop. Thirty years later, he has branches across Brunei under different names, same network, same family. Nobody gave him an ecosystem. He built one. Part 4 of the KopiTalk series asks the only question left: so what do we build?

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KopiTalk with MHO

June 2026

The complaints are familiar. The diagnosis is done. The only question left is whether Brunei is serious enough to do what it already knows.

By Malai Hassan Othman

There is a man in Muara who started out with a barbershop.

Then a restaurant. Then a retail store. Now he has branches in more than one location, each under a different business name, each quietly connected to the same owner, the same family network, the same community of suppliers and workers stretching back to where he came from.

He has been in Brunei for over thirty years.

He did not arrive with capital. He arrived with patience, a trade, and the willingness to learn one business before moving to the next.

Nobody gave him an ecosystem. He built one.

That story comes from a 2019 UBD study on Ali Chandran’s businesses in Brunei. It is not exceptional. It is the pattern. The Indians first worked for Chinese retailers. They learned the trade. When the Chinese moved into white-collar jobs and professional careers, they stepped in and took over the retail space they had vacated. Then they diversified — into tailoring, restaurants, hardware, and construction-linked activities.

One business at a time. One decade at a time.

That is not luck. That is a method.

And if we are honest with ourselves, it is a method Brunei has been watching for thirty years without fully understanding what it was watching.

Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series have been uncomfortable reading — deliberately so. They named the pattern, explained the mechanics, and placed the responsibility where it belongs: not with Ali Chandran, not with Ali Bangla, but with the system we designed, the choices we made, and the culture we allowed to take root.

Part 4 does not relitigate that.

Part 4 asks the only question that matters now: so what do we build?

Start with the most basic truth the series has established. The real competition in Brunei’s retail and food-and-beverage sector is not between local and foreign shopkeepers. It is between organised networks and isolated individuals. The organised network almost always wins. Not because it is foreign. Because it is organised.

The scale of what is being contested is easy to underestimate. Wholesale and retail trade is the largest employer in Brunei’s private sector, with more than 27,000 workers, according to the 2022 Annual Census of Enterprises. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, retail sales reached almost BND448 million. These are not small margins at the edges of the economy. This is where tens of thousands of livelihoods sit — and where the competition between organised networks and isolated individuals plays out every single day.

And domestic retail is under pressure. Bruneians are spending more abroad. In 2017 alone, an estimated BND1.25 billion left Brunei’s retail market and crossed into Malaysia. The businesses that survived that outflow were the ones organised enough to offer something the Miri trip could not easily replace. The ones that were not organised enough simply closed.

So the answer to Ali Chandran and Ali Bangla is not enforcement alone.

Enforcement can close a shop. It cannot build a supply chain.

The answer is a local organisation. And Brunei has been talking about it since the Fifth National Development Plan in 1986.

That plan set out to make Bruneian Malays the leaders of industry and commerce. It did not deliver. The Ninth National Development Plan made the same promise. It did not deliver either. By the Tenth, the ambition was quietly broadened, and the specific target was quietly dropped.

Three development plans. The same aspiration. The same result.

The problem was never the aspiration. The problem was what was being counted as progress.

Licences issued. Programmes conducted. Businesses registered. These are the numbers that have been used to measure entrepreneurship in Brunei for decades. They count inputs. They say nothing about whether a business survived, whether it scaled, whether it employed anyone two years later, or whether the licence holder actually ran the business or quietly rented it out the following month.

A licence registered is not a business built.

A programme conducted is not an entrepreneur-made.

A recorded number is not an enterprise function.

If that is what progress means, Brunei will keep producing impressive statistics while the ecosystem around us continues to be built by someone else.

What genuine progress looks like is harder to count but not hard to define. How many registered businesses are still operating after three years? How many have moved from retail to wholesale, from one location to two? How many cooperative members have built businesses that outlasted the committee meetings? Those are the numbers that tell the real story.

There is another dimension this series cannot ignore, raised by a reader after Part 1 was published.

The commercial spaces that local entrepreneurs depend on — the shopfronts, the market stalls, the trading lots — are often owned by parties who have no particular interest in keeping rents affordable or local businesses alive. When property costs rise, the landlord passes it down. The isolated local operator absorbs it alone or closes. The networked operator absorbs it across the chain and survives.

You cannot build a local economic ecosystem if you cannot afford to stay in the building.

This is where urban planning has a role that goes beyond traffic management and zoning rules. Dedicated commercial spaces within public housing areas — affordable, accessible, designed for small local businesses rather than large commercial tenants — are not a luxury. They are infrastructure for local economic participation. The UBD study made this recommendation in 2019. It remains unaddressed.

So what do we actually build?

Purchasing alliances, so local businesses can buy at the same scale as networked operators. Cooperative structures that are governed like businesses, not managed like committees. Commercial spaces that belong to local enterprises, not to whoever can afford the highest rent. Financing pools that give local entrepreneurs access to working capital without having to borrow alone and fail alone.

And we change what we count.

Not licences. Businesses that last. Not programmes. Entrepreneurs that scale. Not registrations. Supply chains with local hands in them at every link.

The man in Muara who started with a barber shop did not wait for a programme. He did not rent out his opportunity. He worked it — one decade, one business, one branch at a time.

He understood something that three national development plans and decades of entrepreneurship slogans have not managed to instil at scale: that you do not build economic power by registering a licence. You build it by using one.

The question is not whether Brunei knows how to build an ecosystem.

The question is whether we are finally ready to start.

This concludes the four-part KopiTalk series on local economic participation in Brunei. The argument across all four parts is this: the pattern is known, the responsibility is ours, and the blueprint already exists — in the quiet, patient method of those who built ecosystems while we debated who was to blame.

KopiTalk with MHO  •  Malai Hassan Othman

Substack: kopitalkwithmho.substack.com  •  LinkedIn: Distribution

Part 4 of a four-part series on local economic participation in Brunei.