The sorting
HERE, at Sarawak Tribune, my day starts the moment I open the inbox at 2 pm, when the floodgates have already been open for nine hours.
Local, BERNAMA, home, biz, sports – everything lands in folders I’m accountable for, sorted by what it is before I decide what it means: fire, death, crash, event, ongoing, new, big, small.
I gatekeep for an entire editorial team, and we all play our parts. Page-making starts around 6 pm, when our Captain gives each page the final word to sail. Nobody outside this room ever sees the sorting – only the sorted, printed, and gone by morning.
Then, on Sarawak Day, gatekeeping had nothing to do with it. He wasn’t waiting for a story to land on a desk. He was flying it in himself.
An AirBorneo aircraft lifted off the runway at Kuching International, and I felt something I want to be honest about: not pride first. Recognition.
The altitude he actually reached
Here is what almost nobody covering AirBorneo’s launch has bothered to put together, though every piece of it sits in plain public record if you go looking.
Datuk Patinggi Tan Sri Abang Johari worked for Malaysia Airlines. As a young man. As an executive officer, before the MBA, before a single election, before he was anyone’s Premier.
Somewhere in that posting he was sent to Dubai, in the late 1970s, and has said, plainly, what he saw when he got there: nothing. A transit on the way to somewhere else, a stretch of desert with an airstrip and not much reason to land.
He watched, from inside the industry that did it, exactly what one well-run airline does to a place with almost nothing else going for it.
Dubai didn’t get rich on oil alone. It got rich on the decision to become a place that planes had to pass through, and then a place worth stopping for. That’s not folklore.
That’s a policy choice somebody made on purpose, and a young Sarawakian airline officer happened to be standing close enough to watch it happen.
I know a version of that lesson myself, on a far smaller stage. Fifteen years ago, I built a region’s government accounts from almost nothing for AirAsia – universities, police, teachers, every institution the department before me hadn’t bothered courting – until the numbers grew 270 per cent one year, then 500 per cent the next.
I wasn’t chasing a title. I was chasing the same thing Dubai chased: relevance, built one relationship at a time, until the market had to notice.
Tan Sri Tony Fernandes stopped calling me by my name after that. For three years, in a room full of people, I was simply “Sarawak”.
I know exactly what it costs to grow an airline’s reach, in hours and weekends and the parts of yourself you quietly stop tending to.
I paid that cost once, for a company that was never mine, and it still bought me nothing but a nickname when I walked out.
Then there’s his father. The late Tun Abang Openg started as a clerk in the native affairs office, with no institution built to educate a man in his position, so he built his own education out of night classes in Sarikei, sitting exams by lamplight after full days of work, one qualification at a time, with nobody obligated to help him get there.
He became the first Malay Resident in a colonial system that had reserved that post, unofficially but absolutely, for Europeans.
He became Sarawak’s first Governor in 1963, the year his youngest son started secondary school. Abang Johari has said, more than once, what he took from watching that man climb: that education is the only lever available to someone without inherited advantage, and that a government without its own money eventually loses its own footing – the way Sarawak once lost enough of its own to be ceded into crown-colony status in the first place.
Put those two facts beside each other – the father who studied by lamplight to break into a room built to exclude him, and the son who once worked an airline counter and is now, at seventy-five, building his state’s own carrier – and the RM375 fixed fare stops looking like a promotional number.
Run it against what Bavaria did with regional rail, what Emirates did with a single hub, what Dubai did with nothing but position and nerve, and the pattern holds: connectivity priced like infrastructure, not like a product, is how a small place buys itself relevance it wasn’t handed.
It starts looking like the only conclusion a man raised on that specific lesson could possibly have arrived at.
Nobody told you that. I’m not sure anyone else was looking for it.
What gets discharged
There’s a concept in Daoist thought – fù (復), return – the idea that the deepest kind of change isn’t forward motion at all, but a return to where you started, transformed by everything you picked up along the way.
I left the machine that once called me by a region’s name instead of my own.
Abang Johari left an airline counter to eventually build a government, and has now returned, decades later, to build an airline again – except this time it answers to Sarawak, not to a market that will always love it a little less than it loves its own margins.
Islam has its own word for what he’s actually doing with it: amanah – trust, held on behalf of someone else, and answerable for, not just now but on the day it gets counted.
A father’s lessons, held for fifty years and then spent, finally, in service of the people who were supposed to benefit from them all along.
He’s not launching a route. He’s discharging a debt his father never lived to see settled, and he’s doing it at an age when most men his position would be content to let the record stand as it already is.
I’m not writing this to convince you of that in one sitting. I’m writing it because I think I’m one of the very few people in this state’s media who can actually recognise what’s happening here for what it is – having once carried, on a much smaller scale, the exact weight this project is asking one seventy-five-year-old man to carry largely alone.
This is the first piece of a longer project I’m building, chapter by chapter, on what AirBorneo actually is, where it came from, and what it will cost, in the years ahead, to keep the promise a fixed fare makes on day one.
This week’s practice
Before you close this page, do one honest thing: name the piece of knowledge, skill, or cost you’re currently sitting on that you haven’t yet spent in service of anything bigger than yourself.
You don’t have to spend it this week. Just name it. Everything that follows tends to start there.
The full AirBorneo Legacy project begins unfolding this week. This column is chapter one.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
