Who Takes Care of Our Premier?

BY HAZEL JASNI

There is a question I have been carrying quietly for some months now, and I suspect I am not the only Sarawakian carrying it.

If the Premier spends his days taking care of the people, who is taking care of him?

On 4 August, Datuk Patinggi Tan Sri Abang Johari Tun Openg turned 76. In most Sarawakian families, 76 is the age of the uncle who has earned his slow mornings. The kopi-o that goes cold because there is no reason to rush it. The newspaper read cover to cover. Grandchildren climbing over him while he pretends to be annoyed.

It is the age when, after decades of responsibility, a man should be allowed to move at the pace of his own choosing. To wake without an alarm. To sit a little longer after Subuh. To spend an afternoon doing something that serves no purpose other than making him happy.

Instead, four days after that birthday, he was in Sarikei, talking about the state’s first six months and announcing a two-month bonus for civil servants before the Budget had even been tabled.

Not resting. Working. Still going.

I have never had the chance to ask him how he does it, so I can only imagine. I imagine his day begins the way it always has, before the house is awake, on the prayer mat. And I imagine that somewhere inside that prayer, after the words meant for his own soul, there is a quiet request for Sarawak.

For rain that comes at the right time. For the boy in Belaga who wants to be an engineer. For the market trader in Serian whose knees are giving out. For the young family in a kampung wondering whether their children will have to leave home to find a future.

That, I suspect, is his breakfast. Not the meal on the table. The prayer before it.

We are quick in this state to measure a leader in figures, and the figures are there to be measured. Revenue that doubled from around RM7 billion to RM14 billion between 2020 and 2025. Free tertiary education. Higher allowances for community leaders. Roads, bridges, electricity, water, digital connectivity and the long, sometimes frustrating work of bringing opportunity closer to places that have waited a very long time for it.

Numbers travel well in speeches and slide decks. They are the easy part of the story.

The harder part is what those years cost the man carrying them.

Leadership is often spoken about as though it were a job description: policy, administration, negotiation, development, elections. But nobody really writes down the private cost. The missed evenings. The journeys that begin before sunrise. The constant expectation that, when something goes wrong, someone at the top must have an answer.

And then there are the losses that no office can insulate you from.

In June last year, Puan Sri Datuk Amar Juma’ani Tuanku Bujang passed away at Normah, hours after he had left the Gawai gala dinner to be at her side. They had been married since February 1977. Forty-eight years. A lifetime of being the person someone else came home to.

Many of us stood at Masjid Jamek that morning, or watched from wherever we were, and felt the weight of it. You did not need to know the family personally to understand what had been lost. Behind the title, behind the convoy and the speeches and the formalities, there was simply a husband who had lost his wife.

Then, in the way of people who have work to do, he went back to work.

There were town halls to hold, ministers to meet, a state to run. Sarawak carried on because he carried on.

Perhaps that is what we sometimes misunderstand about resilience. We see the person who keeps going and assume that because he keeps going, he must be fine.

But here is the thing about the ones who carry.

Nobody thinks to ask whether they are heavy.

I want to be careful here, because appreciation is not the same as agreement. This is not a column about politics, and it is not a claim that every decision has been the right one. You can question a policy, argue with a direction, hold a government to account, and still pause to recognise the human being at the centre of it.

In fact, I would say we are only a mature society when we can do both at once.

We should be able to scrutinise a government without forgetting the humanity of the person leading it. We should be able to disagree without becoming cruel. And we should be able to acknowledge good work without turning admiration into blind loyalty.

At a town hall earlier this year, when asked about who might come after him, he said something that has stayed with me. If not for you, the people, he said, he would not have become Premier.

There was something revealing in that answer.

For all the machinery of politics, the position ultimately comes down to a relationship between a person and the people he serves. The office may belong to the state, but the years belong to the individual who gives them.

He also spoke about why he introduced free education, and about deeds being what remains after we are gone.

A man of 76 talking about what he leaves behind is not talking about legacy merely in the political sense. He is talking about the ledger every one of us will eventually be shown.

What did we build? Who did we help? What did we leave better than we found it? And when our names are no longer being spoken in rooms where decisions are made, what remains because we were here?

That is why the question of who takes care of him matters.

Perhaps the honest answer is that we all should, and mostly we do not think to.

Taking care of a leader does not mean flattery, and heaven knows he receives enough of that. It means something less comfortable and much more important.

It means giving him room to hand things over.

It means recognising that no state should depend indefinitely on the stamina of one man, however capable or determined he may be. It means building institutions that are stronger than individuals. It means developing successors who are prepared to carry responsibility rather than simply inherit positions.

It means we stop treating one man as the answer to every problem in every longhouse and every kampung.

And perhaps, most simply, it means we let him be 76.

Let him have the slow morning.

Let the kopi-o go cold.

Let the newspaper stay open a little longer on the page he enjoys.

Let there be an afternoon when nobody needs a decision from him.

Because taking care of someone does not always mean doing something for them. Sometimes it means making sure they do not have to do everything themselves.

Sarawak has spent years asking what it needs from its leaders. More development. More autonomy. Better opportunities. Better infrastructure. A stronger economy. Greater recognition of its rights. A future in which our young people can choose to stay because they want to, not because they have nowhere else to go.

Those are legitimate demands. They should remain so.

But perhaps there is another question we ought to ask, quietly, without ceremony.

What does the man who has spent so much of his life answering those demands need from us?

Perhaps he needs the same thing every person eventually needs: trust that the work can continue without him, people around him who will tell him the truth, and the freedom to know that stepping back is not the same as giving up.

And it means, at the very least, that on the mornings he prays for us, some of us remember to pray for him.

Not because he is Premier.

Not because he is 76.

But because, before the title and after the title, he is a man.

He has spent nine years asking what Sarawak needs. It would be a small kindness, and long overdue, for Sarawak to ask what he needs.

Perhaps that is what taking care of the man who takes care of Sarawak really means.

The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.