“If you want a year of prosperity, grow grain; 10 years of prosperity, grow trees; 100 years of prosperity, grow people.”
I keep coming back to this proverb. It won’t leave me alone. Maybe because as an anakbrunei, someone who has watched this country up close for a long time, it puts words to something we all feel but don’t say out loud much. The oil won’t last forever, and we are running out of room to pretend otherwise.
Grain. Trees. People. Let me work through what that means for us.
Grain is the easy part. That’s the trap.
Oil and gas, of course. It built the roads, the schools, the safety net most of us grew up thinking was just normal. But grain gets harvested and then it’s finished. You plant again or you go hungry. Same with oil money. Prices fall, demand shifts, the whole world is moving toward greener energy whether we’re ready or not. Tourism, financial services, SMEs, yes, diversify, fine. But listing industries on a slide isn’t the same as building ones that survive real conditions. We’re good at the first. Not so convincing at the second.
Trees need patience we don’t always have.
This is the medium game. Infrastructure, digitalisation, chasing foreign investment. These are seedlings, not fruit. They’re not meant to pay off next quarter, and if we get impatient, we’ll pull them out before the roots even hold. ICT, green energy, halal manufacturing, none of it grows because someone gave a good speech. It needs policy that survives a reshuffle, people with real skills, and the discipline to finish what we start. We’re better at planting than watering, kalau jujur.
People is the one that keeps me up at night.
Here’s the line that stops me every time. We are a small country. We cannot afford to waste even one person’s potential, not one. And I keep wondering whether we’re actually raising the kind of people this coming world needs, or just recycling the same syllabus that got us here. Are we teaching kids to take risks, to build, to think past the safe answer? Or are we still rewarding jangan menonjol, don’t rock the boat? i-Ready, the entrepreneurship pushes, these are good starts, genuinely. But they need to reach further than the usual faces who already turn up.
Why I can’t drop this.
I’ve seen what we’re capable of. Small, yes. But sharper and more resourceful than we give ourselves credit for, most days. If we want Brunei to still mean something in a hundred years, not just this decade, we have to hold two timelines at once. Spend the oil wealth wisely today. Plant the trees that will carry the next ten or twenty years. And never stop investing in the people who will still be here long after the wells run dry.
This isn’t luck. It’s cultivation. Slow, deliberate, mostly thankless, the kind of work nobody claps for until decades later.
So, to my fellow anakbrunei, what are you actually planting right now? Not what you’d say in a speech. What you’re actually doing.