SEVERAL years before the late Tan Sri Adenan Satem became Sarawak’s fifth chief minister, this writer chanced upon him window-shopping alone at Changi Airport in Singapore. He said he was awaiting his flight accompanying then chief minister Tun Abdul Taib Mahmud to Australia.
Adenan and Taib, of course, went back a very long way. Both were law students in Adelaide and quite naturally held life-long attachment to the country where they spent perhaps their most crucial formative years. Taib even brought home a young Australian bride while Adenan was first married to a sister of Taib.
As among the few foreign-trained Bumiputera professionals of the day, politics was a natural career choice for Taib and later, Adenan. They had been a political team since. Taib became a state minister right after Sarawak assumed self-government on July 22, 1963.
Adenan became the under-study to Taib and only became a full state minister following the infamous “Ming Court” political revolt of 1986. It would be fair to suggest both Taib and Adenan reinforced each other in their political convictions, and together, they had provided the intellectual heft to Sarawak’s governance in the past five decades.
While alone at Changi, Adenan was almost typically lost in his own world. The thoughtful politician had an incisive and perceptive intellect that belied his often rather diffident ways. It was even then known that had Taib had his way, Adenan would be his choice as successor.
The only big imponderable then was Adenan’s rather fragile state of health and he alluded as much when I approached him and broached the subject of the state’s political succession. He was nearing 70, he said, and his time had passed, he rather dismissively waved off the subject.
Of course, as it turned out, his time had not passed. He assumed the mantle of chief minister from his mentor on Feb 28, 2014.
Despite his age and the length of time he had served in government, the new chief minister ushered in an unlikely breath of fresh air after more than three decades with Taib as state leader and had only secured for himself a resounding personal mandate in a state election last year where the Sarawak Barisan Nasional romped home with a landslide win.
Adenan captured the popular mood with a light touch to governance, adopting an inclusive political message, insisting on the state’s political rights and brooking no nonsense from those who would do his state harm.
The chief minister’s basic decency and essential humanity resonate with ordinary Sarawakians; such as when he unhesitatingly approved for the state to assume the million-ringgit bill chalked up by the late state opposition leader Wong Ho Leng for his cancer treatments, or came to the rescue of former state star athlete Watson Nyambek, bankrupted by his inability to settle a similar hospitalisation bill of his dying father.
In recent months, Sarawakians who have met Adenan had come away increasingly concerned about his noticeably frail physical state. He had delegated many official functions requiring his presence to his ministers, but had presented the state budget to the State Assembly in November before going on a well deserved break in Australia.
The chief minister had, on several occasions, publicly intimated about his personal mortality. It was almost real the last time he had a near-death experience that required him to wear a pacemaker to regularise his heartbeat. Such experiences would have brought home to him that he was very much living on borrowed time. They would have certainly goaded him to think and act in his job based on little more than what he thought was truly best for the state.
The chief minister had asked for five years to accomplish what he had set out to do, and while the overwhelming majority of Sarawakians would have been more than willing to grant him that, it was not to be.
Adenan will be rightly mourned by Sarawakians and his untimely demise will be even more intensely felt for the fact that it held such promise that will now have to be fulfilled by his successor.
John Teo views developments in the nation, the region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak. He can be reached via johnteo80@gmail.com