Dirgahayu Kebawah Duli Tuan Patik: Eighty Years On

Assalamu’alaikum everyone. Today, His Majesty turns 80. It feels a bit strange writing that number down. Eighty. For a country as young as Brunei in its modern form, His Majesty’s reign has basically been the entire timeline most of us have known. I honestly wanted to mark this one properly, not just with a quick greeting like I’ve done in past years, but with something that looks back at how long this blog itself has been quietly documenting the same journey.

My Message

Dirgahayu Kebawah Duli Tuan Patik. Eighty years, and still the same steady hand guiding this country through everything it has faced. I reckon what strikes me most, looking back at nearly two decades of writing about Your Majesty on this blog, is how much has changed around that constancy. The Brunei of 2007 is not the Brunei of 2026, but the sense of direction has never really wavered. On behalf of myself and my family, thank you for the years of leadership, for the quiet consistency, and for a Brunei that my children get to grow up in with more opportunity than I had. Semoga Kebawah Duli dikurniakan kesihatan yang baik dan umur yang panjang.

Nearly Twenty Years of Writing About This Day

Going through the archive for this post was honestly a bit of a trip. This blog started as a photography project back in 2000, and some of the earliest coverage I have of His Majesty’s birthday is just that, photos. Streets of Bandar decked out in flags, fireworks over Serasa, a Go Kart challenge in the heart of the capital for the 62nd birthday. No grand commentary, just a young photographer capturing what the celebrations looked like on the ground.

By 2011, something had shifted. Bloggers, tweeters and photographers were turning up to the celebrations with a new kind of energy, and I wrote about that shift itself in a post called Faces from HM65, the idea that social media was changing how people experienced these national moments together. That same year I mentioned that in six years I had not missed a single birthday celebration kickoff in town. Reading that back now, older and slower, made me smile.

2013 was the 67th birthday, and I covered the parade properly, along with a poem for the occasion, Muda wira perkasa, Sultan payung mahkota. Looking at those photos again, the flags, the crowds along Jalan Sultan, it is a reminder of how much of this has stayed consistent even as the format of celebration evolves.

Then came the Golden Jubilee in 2017, marking 50 years since His Majesty’s accession to the throne, a scale of celebration Brunei had not seen before. And more recently, the blog itself has matured alongside the coverage. Instead of just photos and greetings, my more recent posts have leaned into reflection on governance, on Wawasan 2035 and where we stand with less than a decade to go, on the Cabinet reshuffle earlier this year, always with the acknowledgement that these are matters already under active consideration by His Majesty and His Government, and that my role is simply to think through them as a concerned Bruneian who loves this country.

Looking at all of it together, eighty years and roughly nineteen of them documented in some way on this little blog, the throughline is clear enough. A steady hand, a country that keeps building, and a lot of us who grew up watching it happen.

What Eighty Years Has Actually Built

Full independence in 1984 is probably the achievement that gets least attention because it happened so smoothly. His Majesty led the negotiations that ended British protection, signed under the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, and took on the Prime Minister’s role himself from day one rather than easing into it. A lot of newly independent nations went through years of instability figuring out governance from scratch. Brunei did not, largely because the transition was managed rather than improvised.

The bigger structural thing, and I think the one that gets taken for granted most, is how the oil and gas wealth has been managed. His Majesty set up the Brunei Investment Agency back in 1983 specifically to steward that revenue rather than let it get spent as it comes in. That decision underwrites the free education, free healthcare and no personal income tax that most of us grew up assuming were just how things worked. They are not automatic. Plenty of oil producing nations have burned through windfalls in a generation. Brunei treated its reserves as something to be preserved for the next one, and that is a deliberate choice, not luck.

Education is another one worth sitting with. Universiti Brunei Darussalam was set up in the 1980s so that we could build our own graduates at home instead of sending everyone overseas and hoping they came back. That investment widened over the years into vocational and technical colleges too, and it is part of why Brunei has a workforce that can actually staff its own hospitals, schools and ministries rather than importing expertise for everything.

Then there is the diplomacy side of things, which honestly does not get talked about enough. Brunei hosted the APEC Leaders’ Meeting back in November 2000, right here in Bandar Seri Begawan, with Bill Clinton and every other APEC head of state and government in attendance. That was a genuinely big deal for a country our size to pull off, let alone host well. He went on to chair ASEAN in 2013 too, hosting Barack Obama and Li Keqiang. The foreign policy under him has always been the same, careful, consistent, avoid picking fights, and quietly mediate where we can, especially on the South China Sea disputes that have flared up on and off for decades. It is not flashy diplomacy, but it has kept Brunei out of conflicts that have consumed some of our neighbours, and it has meant this tiny country has twice been trusted to run the room for the world’s biggest economies.

What strikes me most at eighty, though, is that His Majesty is still visibly recalibrating rather than coasting. Wawasan 2035 was never just a slogan, it set out to shift Brunei off oil dependency well before the deadline forces the issue, and the recent push on where we stand with less than a decade to go shows that timeline is being taken seriously rather than left to drift. The Cabinet reshuffle earlier this year, bringing younger leaders into more prominent roles, reads the same way to me. That is not the kind of move a leader makes when he is winding down. It is succession planning and course correction happening at the same time, and honestly it feels like a level up in the thinking, not just steady hands on the wheel but an active hand adjusting course for whatever comes after him. Eighty years in, still setting up the next eighty.