The Best Prime Minister We Never Had – In Memory of Adlan Benan Omar (1973 – 2008)

Malaysia lost two great people on Thursday 24 January 2008. One of them you would by now know very well, and another you probably have never heard of. One had filled the pages of major mainstream newspapers but the other, being on the other side of the political devide, only managed to fill the blogosphere. One was known by the name of Tan Sri Megat Junid and another affectionately called Ben by his friends.

Browsing through the pages of Malaysian bloggers’ community, Harakah-daily and Suara Keadilan, one would not have missed the news of the death of the young Malaysian intellectual, Adlan Benan Omar at the age of 35. He was a man with extraordinary intellect. Educated at MCKK, then Abingdon School in Oxford and later graduated with double degrees in Law and History at Cambridge University. He was the first foreign head boy in his high school having won student’s election beating both Conservative and Labour student candidates for the top post. He was co-founder of Cambridge University Malaysian Association (Cumas), founder of student body UKEC and the 1997 recipient of Malaysia Youth award.

He was known among his friends as a walking encyclopedia because of his wealth of knowledge and his ability to memorise facts. Back in 1994, over a weekend night in the dormitory of one of our friends at Cambridge, we had a conversation about Malaysian history and Ben pointed out that there were a lot of errors in our history books. His knowledge of Malaysian history left deep impression on me as he dived into the depth of it and gave us impromptu lecture with the flair of a story teller. His room at Cambridge was full of books. His love of books and his powerful neurons absorbed everything he read like a sponge. I still keep the book on British politics that he gave me as a souvenir. I was doing engineering and had little interest in history, but he did spark my interest in that subject. I still cannot figure out what he was saying to me as he signed the book in Latin!

He was an excellent debater too, with words flowing smoothly out of his mouth in both Malay and English. On one occasion when the Malaysian Deputy Education Minister visited Malaysian students in the university, he started his speech in English but later switched to Malay because he said, to everybody’s laughter, it was an official function and thus must be conducted in Malay. Since I left Cambridge in 1995, I had not seen or heard of him but I knew that one day this guy would become a great man. Reading from the blogs, people who knew him spoke favourably of him. Everybody who had met him spoke of how impressed they were of him. One of the blogs said that even Dr Mahathir joked to him about how one day he would fill in his (Dr M’s) shoes i.e. becoming Prime Minister. He would be a perfect match for UMNO’s own Oxford-educated whiz-kid Khairy Jamaludin. In fact, some years back Ben and Khairy had faced off in a famous debate at John Hopkins University, USA.

I remember he was telling us back in 1994 that he would die young because of his illness which he had since he was 18. I thought it was brave of him to face the reality of his life and yet still managed to live a happy life, going around telling jokes as if he had no serious health problem. He contributed much to his chosen political party, his ideals and his vision for the development of his race and country. Even while he was quite ill, he gave his ideas in helping how to develop the economy of Kelantan, a state often overlooked by Putrajaya because of politics. Ben, you would have been a great Prime Minister but Allah loved you more. May Allah bless your soul. Al-Fatihah.