“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. Can’t shake it, actually. Maybe because as an anakbrunei, someone who’s watched this country up close for a long time, it names something we all sense but rarely say out loud: the oil isn’t forever, and we’re running out of excuses to pretend otherwise.
Grain. Trees. People. Let’s talk about what that actually means for us.
Grain is easy. That’s the problem.
Oil and gas, obviously. It’s built the roads, the schools, the safety net most of us grew up assuming was just how the world works. But grain gets harvested and then it’s gone. You plant again or you go hungry. Same deal with oil revenue: prices crash, demand shifts, the whole planet is sprinting toward greener energy whether we’re ready or not. Tourism, financial services, SMEs, yes, fine, diversify. But adding industries on a spreadsheet isn’t the same as building ones that can actually survive contact with the real world. We’ve been good at the first part. Less convincing on the second.
Trees take patience we don’t always have.
This is the medium game, infrastructure, digitalisation, chasing foreign investment. Seedlings, not fruit. They’re not supposed to pay off next quarter, and if we’re impatient about that, we’ll rip them out before the roots even take. ICT, green energy, halal manufacturing, none of it grows because someone gave a good speech about it. It needs policy that doesn’t change with every reshuffle, people with real skills, and the discipline to actually finish what we start. We’re better at planting than watering, if I’m honest.
People is the one that actually keeps me up.
Here’s the line that stops me every time. We are a small country. We cannot afford to waste one single person’s potential, not one. And yet I wonder, constantly, whether we’re actually building the right kind of people for the world that’s coming, 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 “don’t rock the boat”? i-Ready, the entrepreneurship pushes, good starts, genuinely. But they need to reach a lot further than the usual suspects who already show up to these things.
Why I can’t let this go.
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 in our head at once: spend the oil wealth wisely today, plant the trees that’ll carry the next ten or twenty years, and never, ever stop investing in the people who’ll be here long after the wells run dry.
This isn’t luck. It’s cultivation. Slow, deliberate, often thankless work, the kind 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.