Malaysia eyes more Brunei investments

DATO' Ku Jaafar Ku Shaari served as Malaysia's envoy to Brunei for a little more than three years.

As he gets ready to leave his post, he tells The Brunei Times progress in bilateral relations.

Brunei Times: Dato, what is the current situation between Brunei and Malaysia?

Dato: We are hoping to see more investment from Brunei into Malaysia. Currently, we are talking and there are committees working in different fields as we are in the process of identifying areas of working together. At the same time, we also want to see more participation from Brunei, not only in Sabah and Sarawak, but in other parts of the country as well. We know that there the interest now is towards Sabah-Sarawak, but our chief minister from Terengganu is inviting Brunei for areas of interest, in the east corridor of development in Malaysia.

So, we want Brunei to come to other areas we think that would be potential enough for investors, particularly the government side. For example, Kuala Lumpur itself is developing and the greater KL development will offer a lot of investment opportunities. That means, Brunei does not need to go very far, they got a close neighbour and want to see them participating in our development as well.

Can you give us examples?

Tourism is one sector we are cooperating closely. I'm happy to say we work hard to increase the element of connectivity, that is the connection not only between leaders and senior official, but connectivity between people to people. That was stressed by our Prime Minister and His Majesty as well when they met last time. We have to look at ways how we can improve this connectivity, by air, by sea and land.

We have got ferry to Labuan and Kota Kinabalu that will increase connectivity. Under Bimp-Eaga, there are transportation links for Malaysia with Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Brunei happens to be an important market for Malaysia when we talk about tourism, although people say Brunei is a small number, but it's just below Thailand in terms of arrival numbers. So that makes Brunei an important market to us which cannot be ignored.

Brunei's cooperating with Malaysia in terms of tourism has been strong, what do you see happening next time?

We should package our activities together because to me Brunei has a good package for tourism and with our experience in Malaysia, we are ready to share with Brunei by working together. How Brunei packages it, this will have to be left to the government how they want to increase the tourism package in Brunei for people to come. Then we will benefit together.

Air Asia has already increased flights to twice a day now. Royal Brunei Airlines is flying almost everyday to Kuala Lumpur. Air Asia is also flying Kota Kinabalu, which helps connectivity. Now, we are looking at MASwings coming to Bandar Seri Begawan as they are expanding new routes with new aircraft.

These are some of the things we are working very hard to make sure we achieve what the leaders hope for.

One day, we also hope that people can travel across Sabah or Sarawak without having to use their passport via a smart card or something like that, which will facilitate the movement of people. That will really allow people to connect further as between Brunei, Sabah and Sarawak, you have got money, family members there to strengthen ties and create closer proximity between each other.

What of trade between the two?

Trade, I'm sure will increase ... Two-way trade is around $900 million, of course it is in favour of Malaysia, but I look forward to see more exports from Brunei in particular now your government is serious about promoting small to medium enterprises. I'm sure many people are taking up this offer, producing even on a small scale. Brunei should take advantage of that to export their product, especially food, as that's quite a big market to Brunei.

There are also many companies who already come to Brunei who have got their partner or even have set up small manufacturing businesses here. I'm hoping the SME sector in Brunei would grow bigger and Malaysians are ready to come and participate in it. These are advantages I'm sure that can be leveraged by business people here in Brunei. There are also bigger companies like UEM Builders, Bina Puri and Skali who are operating in the country, which we are proud of.

So we look forward to seeing even more participation from Malaysian companies to participate in things like expos in Brunei.

(The Brunei Times, September 11, 2010 – Goh De No)