Word: brunei
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...instance, when the Crown Prince of Brunei, Al-Muhtadee Billah, enrolled at Magdalen college, officials demanded that the prince's guard remain outside the college grounds, despite the fact that, as the son of the ultra-wealthy Sultan of Brunei, the prince was an obvious kidnap target. Then college head Anthony Smith told TIME: "We felt that security inside the grounds would negatively impact both the prince's experience and that of his fellow students. I would often see a man outside the college gates who looked strangely ordinary and who would follow the crown prince when he left...
...space, his flight mirroring the nation's ambitions. Poverty has been reduced from half the population at independence to just 5% today, as an affirmative-action policy created a prosperous Malay middle class that had never before existed. In Asia, only the nations of Singapore, Japan, South Korea and Brunei rank higher than Malaysia in the U.N.'s Human Development Index. Most impressively, while other multiethnic nations like Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka and Rwanda fractured into conflict, Malaysia has largely kept peace between groups that include Muslim Malays (about 50%); Buddhist and Christian Chinese (roughly 25%); Hindu, Sikh and Muslim Indians...
...years ago, with a barrel of oil dipping to about $10, there was little interest in Southeast Asian petroleum, other than established deposits in Indonesia and Brunei. But now, global instability and rising demand from India and China have spiked oil prices to over $80 per barrel, and governments are nationalizing major fields from Russia to Venezuela. At the same time, as offshore technology improves, oil firms can hunt in deeper, tougher waters, like the Timor Gap between Australia and East Timor. So the region has exploded with oil fever. Vietnam plans to explore in seven offshore blocks, Malaysia this...
...jungle capital Naypyidaw, the junta has not even suggested that oil money will benefit its people. While many oil companies support the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which pushes countries to explain how they spend petroleum money, Chinese oil giants, dominant in Burma, refuse to sign up. Even Brunei, a country that at least used decades of petroleum wealth to provide free health care, is not immune. Suckled on oil, Bruneians demonstrate minimal entrepreneurship, leaving the country with almost no industry when oil runs out, possibly within 20 years...
That should be good news for some of the poorest countries in the world's poorest continent. After all, Norway and Britain used North Sea oil to underwrite their welfare states, while small oil powers like Oman and Brunei found themselves catapulted out of subsistence living in a generation. Likewise, Alberta's burgeoning petroleum industry has transformed the province into a major driver of the Canadian economy. But oil is not always a boon. What if it fuels corruption rather than development, and creates the same combustible mix of great wealth, relative poverty, grievance and instability...