Day One of LegCo: The Number Was 0.7%. Nobody Blinked.

KopiTalk LegCo Tracker · Second Meeting, Day One — In-Depth (From the Hansard) · 3 August 2026

A decade of growth averaging 0.7 per cent a year. A minister said so himself, on the floor, while making the case for a new coordinating post. Hansard records no follow-up. What came next across the rest of Day One either answers that silence or deepens it.

By Malai Hassan Othman

The Hansard records no request for the figure to be repeated, no question asking what had held it down, and no follow-up requiring a target for lifting it. Yet what Yang Berhormat Dato Seri Setia Dr. Haji Abdul Manaf bin Haji Metussin told Council that Monday morning, while laying out the economic case for his newly created post, was about as blunt an admission as a minister makes on the floor of the Majlis Mesyuarat Negara: over the ten years from 2015 to 2025, Brunei's economy grew, on average, by seven-tenths of one per cent a year. The non-oil-and-gas sector grew by 2.7 per cent annually over the same period. Belum mencukupi dan memadai, he called it: not sufficient, not adequate. The debate then moved on. Nobody returned to the number.

That admission is the real backdrop to everything Council did on Day One. YB Dato Seri Setia Dr Manaf identified five priority sectors — oil and gas, food, tourism, information and communications technology, and services — supported by roadmaps and blueprints already covering downstream oil and gas, food, tourism, the digital economy, ICT, maritime trade logistics, aviation and financial services. Coordination groups already exist under parts of that architecture. His case was not that the government has no plan. It was that the machinery around those plans must be strengthened, formalised where appropriate and raised to ministerial level when cross-cutting problems cannot be settled inside one portfolio.

The morning's business built towards Usul Bilangan 4/2026, moved by Yang Berhormat Pehin Datu Lailaraja Major General (Rtd) Dato Paduka Seri Awang Haji Halbi bin Haji Mohd Yussof. The motion endorsed a decision His Majesty had made at the 4 June Cabinet reshuffle to appoint three Coordinating Ministers — for National Security, Economic Policies, and Social Policies and Manpower. He returned His Majesty's own framing of the job to Council: "Jawatan Menteri Penyelaras bukan sekadar satu gelaran tetapi merupakan satu amanah" — the post is not merely a title, but a trust. With fewer than ten years left until 2035, he said, ministries can no longer work in silos.

Read beside YB Dato Seri Setia Dr Manaf's growth figure, the new structure looks less like routine bureaucratic reorganisation and more like an institutional response to a decade in which existing arrangements have not delivered growth at the pace Wawasan Brunei 2035 requires. The bet is that clearer coordination across ministries can move seven-tenths of one per cent somewhere higher. Hansard establishes the diagnosis. It does not yet give the public a baseline, a delivery owner for each national target or a date by which the new machinery must prove that it works.

Yang Berhormat Awang Haji Salleh Bostaman bin Haji Zainal Abidin identified the failure mode later that afternoon without directly referring to the 0.7 per cent figure. Brunei, he told Council, does not lack plans, strategies, studies, blueprints or key performance indicators. What it faces is jurang antara perancangan dan penyampaian — the gap between planning and delivery — often produced by weak coordination. An issue moves from one ministry to another without a clear final owner. He called it institutional ping-pong. Set beside the morning's number, his diagnosis asks the question Day One never put directly to the economic minister: why has a decade of planning produced only seven-tenths of one per cent average annual growth, and what has been getting lost between plan and delivery?

Yang Berhormat Dayang Chong Chin Yee supplied two long-running examples. The proposed Brunei Stock Exchange has been under consideration for more than a decade. Preparations began in 2015, 2017 was once identified as a possible launch year, and a central securities depository system was developed in May 2017. Council was informed in March 2026 that the exchange is now expected to launch at the end of the third quarter of 2027. If that timetable holds, twelve years will have passed from preparation to opening — nearly as long as the decade covered by YB Dato Seri Setia Dr Manaf's growth figures.

Her second example was public transport. A comprehensive plan appeared in 2015, followed by a proposed route network in 2016 and implementation once targeted for mid-2017. Further studies, redesign and procurement followed. By March 2026, negotiations were continuing with two shortlisted companies under a request-for-proposal process, while a more flexible Demand Responsive Transit service was expected to launch during 2026. The two shortlisted companies belonged to the bus project, not the Stock Exchange. Both timelines nevertheless point to the same problem: an announcement is not delivery, and complexity cannot become a permanent explanation for delay.

YB Chong's answer was not indiscriminate haste. Major projects, she acknowledged, require careful planning, consultation and technical preparation. But every cross-agency initiative should have a clear lead, a realistic timeline, defined responsibilities, measurable benchmarks, an escalation mechanism and regular monitoring. She also proposed a public Wawasan Brunei 2035 platform showing targets, timelines, progress, responsible parties and corrective action when implementation falls behind. Transparency, she argued, is not about finding fault. It is about sustaining momentum and public confidence.

Unemployment supplied a sharper test because Council heard two different ways of measuring the labour problem. In the morning, Yang Berhormat Dato Seri Setia Awang Haji Ahmaddin bin Haji Abdul Rahman, Coordinating Minister for Social Policies and Manpower and Minister of Home Affairs, gave the Brunei Employment Centre's administrative count: 14,976 active jobseekers as of June 2026. Of these, 11,876 — seventy-nine per cent — were between twenty-one and thirty-five. Of the overall total, 4,740 held a bachelor's degree or higher, 4,572 had secondary education or below, and 3,217 held technical or vocational qualifications. Those three educational categories account for eighty-four per cent of the registered total; Hansard did not specify the remaining categories in that passage.

The minister then turned to 22,274 recipients of assistance from the Department of Zakat, Waqaf and Baitulmal and the Department of Community Development between January 2023 and 24 July 2026. Of them, 11,649 — 52.3 per cent — were unemployed. He did not literally describe welfare and joblessness as the same problem wearing two departmental names. But his own data made the overlap difficult to miss: unemployment, education, employability and access to economic opportunity sit inside the welfare caseload, not outside it.

In the afternoon, YB Salleh Bostaman cited the 2025 Labour Force Survey: unemployment at 5.2 per cent. Speaking after him, Yang Berhormat Pehin Orang Kaya Johan Pahlawan Dato Seri Setia Awang Haji Adanan bin Begawan Pehin Siraja Khatib Dato Seri Setia Haji Md. Yusof cited the corresponding headcount from the same survey — 11,600 unemployed people in 2025, up from 10,900 in 2024. These were not three incompatible unemployment totals. The 5.2 per cent and 11,600 came from the same survey; the 14,976 figure counted active jobseekers registered with the Brunei Employment Centre. What the Council did not explain was why those two systems produced such different pictures, what each one included, and which measure would anchor national employment policy.

YB Salleh Bostaman also set the survey figure beside another trend: foreign workers in the private sector increased from around 60,000 in 2021 to more than 82,000 in 2025. He described that as evidence of economic recovery and increased labour demand, while arguing that growth must translate into more quality employment for Bruneians. He also described the 5.2 per cent rate as ASEAN's highest in 2025 and warned that underemployment and young people outside the register deepen the problem. Those were his claims on the floor. They sharpen, rather than settle, the need for one transparent labour-market baseline shared across government.

One number Council did settle is one this column's earlier dispatch, written from press coverage before the primary transcript was available, wrongly reported as unresolved. Yang Berhormat Awang Haji Daud bin Jihan asked how many civil servants were waiting for government housing and how long they had waited. The Hansard shows that Yang Berhormat Dato Seri Setia Haji Awang Nazmi Haji Awang Mohamad, Minister at the Prime Minister's Office for Public Service Administration, answered directly: as of 9 July 2026, 1,092 civil servants were on the Public Service Department's waiting list — four in Division I, 157 in Division II, 247 in Division III and 684 in Division IV. The average wait was between one and four years. This column previously said the number had not been provided. It had. That mistake is corrected here in the open.

The explanation was also more complete than the earlier dispatch recorded. Supply is limited, demand is high for particular house types, some applicants remain on the list until their preferred category becomes available, and some government flats require repairs before they can be allocated. Other ministries, departments and public higher-education institutions administer separate housing stocks and waiting lists. The 1,092 therefore covers housing controlled by the Public Service Department, not necessarily every civil servant waiting anywhere in government. That qualification matters as much as the headline number.

The coordination problem appeared in miniature at Menglait. Under a question about land-law changes that now cap shophouse leases at thirty years, the Minister of Development described a commercial site containing 61 shophouses and a badly damaged access road. ABCi approached the relevant owners about repairing it, but only three eventually agreed to contribute voluntarily. The minister used the case to illustrate the difficulty of maintaining privately owned commercial areas and the resistance faced by proposals such as management corporations. If voluntary agreement among owners is difficult at one site, coordinating seven national-security priorities, five economic priority sectors and an interlocking employment-and-welfare system across government will demand considerably more than goodwill.

YB Salleh Bostaman eventually set out five practical tests for the new structure. Translate national priorities into joint coordination activities. Name an accountable owner for every national outcome. Operate an Integrated National Wawasan Dashboard using the KPIs government already has rather than manufacturing more. Establish performance-review schedules that produce decisions, corrective action and escalation when targets slip. And measure outcomes that people can actually see and feel. He also asked how budgets, manpower, data and digital systems would be aligned behind shared priorities. That is the operational question beneath the motion.

None of those mechanisms moves a growth rate by itself. Seven-tenths of one per cent does not rise because a coordinating minister is appointed or because a motion is debated with fifteen minutes allotted to each speaker. It rises when somebody specific must explain why a target has slipped, what corrective decision follows and when the result will be visible. On Day One, no such requirement was placed on the public record for the number that mattered most. The Hansard records the 0.7 per cent. It records the diagnosis. What this Meeting still has to produce is the delivery contract between them.

Day One at a Glance

• The number nobody followed up on — YB Dato Seri Setia Dr Manaf, moving the economic case for his new Coordinating Minister post, told Council that Brunei's economy grew by an average of just 0.7 per cent a year from 2015 to 2025 — 2.7 per cent excluding oil and gas — and called it "belum mencukupi dan memadai," not sufficient, not adequate. No one on the floor asked a follow-up question.

• The motion — Usul Bilangan 4/2026 endorsed His Majesty's 4 June decision to create three Coordinating Minister posts — National Security, Economic Policies, and Social Policies and Manpower — meant to stop ministries "working in silos" with fewer than ten years left to 2035.

• The diagnosis — YB Salleh Bostaman told Council Brunei does not lack plans, strategies or KPIs — it lacks delivery. He named the failure mode "institutional ping-pong" and proposed five fixes: joint coordination activities, a named accountable owner for every national outcome, one integrated dashboard using KPIs that already exist, performance-review schedules with real consequences, and outcomes measured by what people can actually see and feel.

• Unemployment, two ways — The Brunei Employment Centre counted 14,976 active jobseekers as of June 2026. The 2025 Labour Force Survey put the unemployment rate at 5.2 per cent — 11,600 people, up from 10,900 in 2024, and the highest rate in ASEAN that year. Both are real; nobody explained on the floor why they diverge or which one guides policy. Separately, of 22,274 people who received JUZWAB and JAPEM welfare assistance since January 2023, 52.3 per cent were unemployed.

• Two decade-long delays — The Brunei Stock Exchange has been in preparation since 2015 and is now expected to launch in Q3 2027 — twelve years, if it holds. A comprehensive public transport overhaul, planned since 2015, is only now producing a more flexible Demand Responsive Transit service, due to launch in 2026.

• The housing number, corrected — As of 9 July 2026, 1,092 civil servants were on the Public Service Department's government-housing waiting list, with an average wait of one to four years. This column's earlier dispatch wrongly said that figure hadn't been given — the Hansard shows it was, that same morning.

• Coordination, in miniature — At Menglait, 61 shophouses share one badly damaged access road. When the Authority on Building Control and Construction Industry asked owners to fund the repair voluntarily, only three agreed. New land-law rules now cap shophouse leases at thirty years.