ON HIS 72nd birthday today, Sarawak Premier Abang Johari Openg said one of his birthday wishes is to see the day when all Sarawak students get free university education, all paid for by the sovereign fund he’s establishing soon.

“This is my intention. Whether I can do it or not, I leave it to God.”

“But that is my (intention). If countries like Germany and Norway can do it, there’s no reason why we cannot do it,”  he said when opening a new museum in Limbang today, the town where he was born.

Yesterday, Abang Johari had said the bill to provide the legal framework for the formation of the wealth fund would be tabled at the budget sitting of the state legislative assembly in November.

“We now have an idea of how our wealth fund should be,” he said, touching on his study tours to Norway, Singapore and the United Kingdom on how the respective countries established and managed their funds.

He went to Norway because the country has a similar resource-based economy like Sarawak’s, to Singapore to study how a country with no resources could still have such a fund and the UK on the “global management” of its fund.

Abang Johari went to Norway in late May for a two-day study tour on the country’s Government Pension Fund Global which had grown from its first round of oil money injections worth two billion Kroner (RM6.44 billion) 25 years ago to US$1.34 trillion ((RM5.97 trillion) in 2021.

He went to Singapore in the first week of last month and had only returned from his UK visit on Tuesday.

The museum Abang Johari opened is a replica of the district officer’s quarters in the 50’s and rebuilt on the site of the quarters he was born in.

His father was once a district officer there. – August 4, 2022.