Suhaimi Zainul-Abidin's appeal to all

In the late 1990s, inflammatory remarks by BJ Habibie, then Indonesian president, probably affected the life trajectory of Suhaimi Zainul Abidin, a Malay Singaporean then doing his national service.

It was a time of regional turmoil, what would later be called the Asian Financial Crisis. Financial woes, including the rupiah’s collapse, prompted socio-political chaos, notably the May 1998 riots around Indonesia, which included anti-Chinese pogroms that saw at least 160 people raped and over a 1,000 dead. Suharto resigned the same month, ending his 32-year autocratic reign. Habibie, his vice-president, took over.

Habibie had already felt slighted by earlier comments from Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister, which appeared to question his suitability as vice-president. In August 1998, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) quoted the new president Habibie: “… a friend in need is a friend indeed. I don’t have that feeling from Singapore.” Pointing at a map in his office, he said: “…there are 211 million people [in Indonesia]…Look at that map. All the green [area] is Indonesia. And that red dot is Singapore. Look at that.”

In doing so he unwittingly gifted Singaporeans a catchphrase, which just weeks later had already been memorialised—we’re just a “little red dot,” said Goh Chok Tong, Singapore’s prime minister, sarcastically— and subsequently transfigured into a badge of pride, one depicting our (apparent) outsized ambition and achievements.

Habibie wasn’t done. In February 1999, Taiwanese media quizzed him about discrimination against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia. Habibie responded with whataboutism. “In Singapore, if you are a Malay, you can never become a military officer. They are the real racists, not here.”

At the time, Suhaimi was about to graduate from the Office Cadet School (OCS) of the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF). Few would have expected him to be there, though not because of skin colour. Suhaimi hadn’t, in his view, done that well at his A-Levels, and thus had been conscripted only in the second junior college batch.

He also entered unfit: “I struggled to pass my IPPT [a fitness test]. When I went into the army, zero pull-ups.” By the end of basic training, Suhaimi could do seven pull ups, and by the end of OCS, 15. “It’s amazing what your body can do if you put some rigour into your training.”

Given his fascination with army tactics, Suhaimi went on to win a prize at OCS for military knowledge. Just weeks after Habibie’s comment, he also found himself being interviewed for OCS’s top award, the Sword of Honour. No ethnic Malay had ever won it, Suhaimi was told. (It later emerged that there'd been at least one previously.)

“Could it be that the decision was made [by the SAF]? Let’s push this guy up to make a point. Okay, maybe I worked hard enough to actually be there. But the fact that I was there presented a nice opportunity for them.”

Almost immediately, Suhaimi, just 20 then, faced doubters. “I had dozens of people who, in my face, just basically told me, ‘Ya lah, it’s because of who your father is.’” Zainul Abidin Rasheed is a former minister of state with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP).

Suhaimi, a self-professed “late bloomer”, credits the army, including his commanders who “saw something in me”, as an inflection point. “In real life it doesn’t mean anything, right? Who cares that you are ‘Sword of Honour’? But to myself, at least it told me, okay, you know, if I work hard, maybe I can achieve something. And as a result of that, I took university a lot more seriously. And I took work a lot more seriously.”

Suhaimi, 44 this year, is today the CEO of Quantedge, a leading Singapore-founded hedge fund, and director at numerous non-profit organisations. His background and experience are unusual for a minority Singaporean: the military as personal rejuvenator; ethnicity as a source of possible advantage; and networks flowing down the family tree.

Throughout his career, Suhaimi has had to grapple with questions around privilege, tokenism, and meritocracy. They inform his view of the just, equitable and race-neutral Singapore that he is striving to help build, one where helping and empowering those in need–including, he believes, the socio-economically disadvantaged, single mothers and migrant workers—is second nature to all.

Suhaimi believes that Sakdiah’s humble background—her mum mended clothes and her dad was a janitor—instilled in her a discipline and focus on education as a pathway to success. Zainul and Sakdiah were each one of 10 siblings, and the only ones from their respective families to make it to university, where they met.

“We’re the lucky offspring of the two graduates in their families. We had many advantages.” They never asked for much, Suhaimi said, but when they did, their parents provided it. Once a month the family would go out for a nice dinner, he said, to somewhere like Pizza Hut.

For our two main interviews last November, Suhaimi chose Providore at Downtown Gallery, along Shenton Way, the heart of Singapore’s financial district. The first time we met I was struck by his height. In fitted shirt and pants, clean-cut boyish looks, and a deep voice given to a lawyer’s witticisms and caveating, one can picture him alongside Meghan Markle in “Suits”. He often ends sentences with “right?”, seeking acknowledgement, offering a conversational path in. Like with others from the polished corporate elite, it’s a smoothness that sometimes has me wondering what I’ve missed.

Suhaimi attended Raffles Institution (RI), a premier secondary school in Singapore, though not necessarily out of choice. After scoring “decent grades” at the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE), his father, an RI old boy, asked where he wanted to go.

“I want to go to ACS [Anglo Chinese School]…I knew very little about schools but I knew ACS was a lot cooler [than RI]…[at that age] all I wanted to do was play football.” The mention of a rival school must have irked his dad. “No way, we’re going to RI,” Zainul told Suhaimi.

So Suhaimi didn’t get his choice of school or sport (RI had phased out football), and would soon encounter race-based policies that would affect his life. RI, he said, had decided that year to experiment with the configuration of classes: Suhaimi and all the other Malay kids were put in the same class.

“It’s obviously easier for scheduling for Malay class, right? But as you would expect, we would hang out together. So we became like ‘the Malay gang’…the teachers labelled us as being very cliquish, as if we weren’t willing to, you know, mix around with other people. And apparently, they’ve never done that [class grouping] since.”

The interesting side effect of this was that almost all the Malay kids ended up playing hockey together, he said. “It was because our form teacher was in charge of hockey…So all of us for the first time picked up hockey sticks. And transferred everything that we do on a football pitch to hockey.” After a long drought, Suhaimi said, RI started winning gold medals for hockey. “I always look back at that and wonder, how did they manage to get a bunch of Malay boys together to play hockey?”

Suhaimi laments the increased instrumentalisation of sports in school today. Unlike in his time, “co-curricular activities” are now formalised in the admissions process, and are thus seen by many more as a means to get into a good school than an arena for personal growth.

I asked Suhaimi how his wife and he deal with these pressures in their parenting of their two sons, 10 and seven. (Suhaimi requested that Jom omits the names of his family members, who are not in the public eye.) His wife left her job to become the kids’ main caregiver: “She decided that she wanted to spend more time with the kids. And she supports me a whole lot. And I couldn’t do what I do without all the support.”

Suhaimi, endlessly analytical, claims that his own parents “only got it right” with his younger sister, who “did very well, I think, in both school and in life.” With Suhaimi’s older son, he’s trying to resist the inevitable pressure of the next two years leading up to the PSLE. “I don’t think that grades should matter so much. Especially not at this young age…I think there are a lot of people out there who, if you give them more space and more time to find themselves they can fulfil their potential, which is great for society.”

When Jom visited their home for the photo shoot, his sons joined us in the living room. We discussed their nascent interest in chess and Formula 1. Every Sunday, Suhaimi takes them for hockey practice in Sengkang. While they train with other primary school kids, Suhaimi trains with secondary school boys one-third his age. “Just to sort of keep myself healthy and hopefully also to show my kids an example of what it means to train seriously.”

Suhaimi and his wife have probably been a bit too successful in emphasising to their kids the merits of a well-rounded life. “My kids now turn around and tell me: ‘Dad, don’t work so hard. Why do you work so hard? Is money the most important thing?’” They weren’t born yet, when Suhaimi was most intensely caught in the Singaporean rat race.

“At the time it was VK Rajah, he was really kind,” Suhaimi said, of the famous lawyer who’d later serve as high court judge and Singapore attorney-general. (TT Rajah, VK’s father, was a secretary-general of the PAP, who later went on to join Barisan Sosialis, and was detained without trial by Lee for 18 months, before co-founding the law firm in 1976 with Tann Wee Tiong, also a PAP co-founder.)

“VK Rajah said ‘I’ll take you under my wing, you’ll be my pupil, why don’t you join us?’ Then I went home and told my dad, and my dad said, ‘No. You’re going to A&G, you’re going to work with Shanmugam.’…OK. That’s it. That’s how it goes. [Laughing.] But no regrets. I really enjoyed my time there.”

K Shanmugam, currently home affairs and law minister, had entered politics in 1988 and kept practising until he became law minister in 2008. At the time he was Zainul’s parliamentary colleague.

When young, Suhaimi had been fascinated by legal dramas on television: “Lawyering is nothing like what you see on TV. I came back and sort of began to realise that.” Though he thinks he would have enjoyed being in the courtroom, other aspects of being a disputes lawyer didn’t appeal. “Litigation is a tough business. You can be a good litigator. But dealing with clients who are most of the time pretty unhappy. That’s not something I wanted for my life...it’s hard to disentangle those feelings in work and life.”

So while his dad had guided him to A&G and Shanmugam (whom he met just once), Suhaimi, within two weeks of formally joining, had concluded his own assessment of the emotional burdens of different roles, and his own inclinations. He decided to switch internally to corporate law: “…where people are happy because they’re all striving towards a deal. At the end of it when your job is done, they all celebrate, both sides…but litigation is not like that. More often than not even if you win a case you’re not fully happy. And it gets worse when they see your bill,” he laughed.

Suhaimi really enjoyed the interpersonal elements of corporate law: building connections, winning deals, getting mandates, and cultivating relationships for return business. “That was the more fun part, rather than the technical bit of lawyering itself.”

Two facets of army life seemed to recur. First, Suhaimi was again drawn to competitive tactics: “Which areas of law do I want to specialise in? Do I want to market myself and try and corner the market a little bit?” Second, like his commanders at OCS, Suhaimi’s superiors at A&G took a keen interest in his development. “They gave me a lot of leeway. Within 12 months, I was doing negotiations with partners from foreign law firms. Overnight negotiations and all that. And at the back of your mind, thinking like, I’m gonna screw this up. But luckily, nothing sort of went wrong.”

Partners also encouraged him, then in his mid 20s, to start taking out clients for lunch: “So by the time I was in my early 30s, these were the guys heading the teams at the banks and they were the ones giving out deals. So it pays off to sort of cultivate friendships.”

Working in law helped Suhaimi refine his own art of negotiation, because “a lot of life is about convincing others,” whether business partners or family. While he’s worked with pleasant lawyers, he’s also had to deal with opposing lawyers “who can be really, really mean” because “they want to bully you.” He believes that “there’s a pretty sort of adversarial approach to negotiations in Singapore,” which leads to a binary, win-lose, zero-sum view of the relationship and outcome.

Many here, he believes, when encountering a different point of view, will instinctively think that they’re not aligned with the other person even though they ultimately are. “It’s something that we often don’t remind ourselves of, which is the style of negotiation, the style of going through any dispute. There are better ways to do it, rather than how we normally approach it. Which is to focus on commonality and just being kind.”

Yet, all those opportunities came within 80-hour, six-day workweeks. Suhaimi would usually begin at 7am and, if lucky, end by 10pm. “I was doing five hours of sleep a day…and then there’ll be one weekend where you completely crash, your body can’t take it anymore. Or, periodically, once every few months I’d fall really ill and sleep for one or two days. So you know it’s unhealthy. But at the time I think it was quite common. And our partners used to also tell us, ‘Everybody goes through it. Mine was worse when I was younger.’”

(Only 48 percent of Singaporean lawyers surveyed last year said that they’ll encourage their children to join the profession, down from 77 percent in 2021.)

Suhaimi joined A&G in 2004 and by 2009 had become a junior partner in the firm, a position that afforded him more control over his time. The same year, he got married, and though he still often worked Saturdays (“she’d come pick me up from the office and we’d go out”), he’d started to become more discerning about balancing work and family time. “I always thought I was gonna be a lawyer for life.”

In 2013, Suhaimi was already an investor in Quantedge, knew the management, and was excited about its plans to grow its then US$0.5bn portfolio (over US$3bn as of May 2022). But what “really resonated” with him, he told Hedge Funds Club last year, was that it wanted to do good, to create “a positive impact on our communities.” He joined as director and legal counsel, and was appointed CEO in 2018: a position from which he has been able to nurture the firm’s corporate culture.

Suhaimi believes that three related trends that have improved corporate work-life balance since his A&G days. First, leaders have recognised the need to make adjustments, partly by making compensation structures more egalitarian so more juniors can be hired. Second is the competition from foreign tech and law firms, which may have “more compelling offers and arrangements” for employees.

Third is the influence of Millennials and Gen Zs in Singapore’s workplace. Laughing off stereotypes about a “strawberry generation”, Suhaimi believes that by persistently lobbying for better work-life balance, they’re helping to ensure that people can have “longer and more fulfilling” careers. “Just because people prioritise other things as opposed to just pure hard work, doesn’t mean they’re weaker as a generation.”

I asked Suhaimi about another alleged trait of “strawberries”, their sensitivity to criticism. “The question today: ‘Is it appropriate to deliver criticism the way that we used to, when we know that there are better ways to do it?’”

Separately, he credited them for larger societal shifts around sustainability: “They’re more worldly, more alive to bigger issues at play…things that maybe our forefathers didn’t really think about when they pushed for modernisation, industrialisation and GDP growth…this so-called ‘strawberry generation’ is probably going to save our planet.” The median age of Quantedge’s 72 employees—57 in Singapore and 15 in New York City—is just 30.

Suhaimi believes employees enjoy the firm’s small size, so people know each other well (contrasting it with big tech firms); the quality of the problem sets, which makes work fulfilling; and the flat structure. “I sit next to my finance team in front of my trading team, I’m right in the trenches…it’s not some faraway corner office.”

By working at Quantedge, Suhaimi wants employees to earn enough to subsequently pursue other passions and dreams: most of them have a majority of their own personal assets (primary home aside) invested in the fund. But more than that, he hopes that they believe “they have given their time to an organisation for a good cause.”

The Quantedge Foundation, a charity, was founded in 2016 to address social and environmental issues partly by deploying the firm’s cutting-edge analytical rigour. It’s funded internally and is entirely voluntary. It disbursed over S$5.5m in 2020-2021. A primary area of focus is enhancing social mobility through educational opportunities, from preschool to university. “We need to guard against the formation of a permanent underclass.”

A scholarship programme with the Singapore Management University, for instance, helps fund some 20-25 Singaporeans every year who can’t afford tuition. Suhaimi’s hope is that all Singaporean universities eventually offer needs-blind admissions—offering places to students regardless of their financial situation.

More generally, Suhaimi has observed a professionalisation of the social services in Singapore over the past three to five years. There’s the greater use of metrics with an eye to impact assessment. There’s a shift from a focus on outputs (e.g. how many meals or students are funded) to outcomes (e.g. the downstream impact on the desire to learn, or changing life aspirations).

“We’ve also managed to draw better people into the space.” As an example Suhaimi mentioned Kevin Tan, founder of Tri-Sector Associates, which structures pay-for-success projects, a form of cross-sector partnership where pay-outs by government or others are tied to defined social outcomes (for example, lower rates of recidivism). “It’s a much tougher path, because it involves a lot of sacrifice in terms of what you could potentially earn.” They should be getting, he said, a salary “similar to what civil servants are getting paid.” In 2015, paid workers at non-profits made up only about 2 percent of Singapore’s total workforce, compared with 7.7 percent in the US and 8.5 percent in Australia, according to Bain, a consultancy. Still, all these efforts have led to sharp increases in charitable giving: donations rose from S$2.65bn in 2017 to S$3.12bn in 2020.

It may seem odd for the boss of a hedge fund, sometimes portrayed as part of a cabal of rapacious financiers out to plunder the world, to also be so concerned about addressing inequalities, giving away money, and improving the social sector in Singapore. Yet it’s a fairly common purpose among the younger breed of successful techpreneurs globally. Many pledge allegiance to effective altruism, a contemporary movement focused on earning supernormal profits that can then be channelled to social good. The movement’s contradictions have come to the fore recently because of the actions of one of its high priests, Sam Bankman-Fried, former boss of FTX.

In leading these quite different organisations, Suhaimi seems to channel both his dad, Zainul, and his mum, Sakdiah. The former, he said, who’s “always been about serving communities”; and the latter emphasising the importance of individual responsibility, that there’s “a limit to that sort of help”.

Aside from A&G, the army is also where Suhaimi developed his leadership chops. He believes it helped rid him of some youthful machismo. “What do you think makes for a good leader?” asked Bernard Tan, the commanding officer of the battalion Suhaimi was interviewing for after he passed out of OCS.

“You got to be the best at everything you do. Better than all your men,” Suhaimi instinctively replied. Tan, somebody Suhaimi looked up to and who has since passed, accepted the answer. “But I quickly learned that that’s not what a leader is. You shouldn’t pressure yourself to be the best. Embrace the things that you’re weak at. Humanise yourself so that people can accept you.”

Since completing his reservist obligations, Suhaimi, a major, continues to volunteer in the 7th Singapore Infantry Brigade for about three weeks a year. “My wife keeps asking me: ‘How come you never seem to end? It was national service.’”

Suhaimi does think it can be made more flexible, for example to allow elite sportspeople some exceptions so they don’t lose their prime years. He also thinks it should be used to foster some skills that are transferable. “The army today is not about shining boots, marching, and mindless punishments…we need our national service experience to be additive to the personal and professional development of Singaporeans.”

His position and tenure in the army has offered him insights into the actual threats Singapore faces. “We’re talking about real day-to-day military vehicles and aircraft going into your airspace and sea space…you know that there are some microaggressions that are going on all the time. Which means these are never permanently your friends.”

Responding to my own dovish views on the military, Suhaimi said: “It’s a sad fact of life, lah. I mean, if you ask me what would I most love to see? The whole world at peace. Nobody building weapons and wasting money. That’ll be the ideal. That’s not the world that we live in.”

While a proud member of the SAF, Suhaimi is not above criticising it. After all, Habibie was maybe partially right. Even though Singapore has long had Malay officers, many Muslims, harking back to Lee’s paranoia about their allegiance given Singapore’s Islamic neighbour, aren’t allowed in certain battalions. Suhaimi himself wanted to be a tank commander but Muslims weren’t allowed in Armour. “I was posted to 3rd Guards and I loved it,” he said.

“As far as I know, there are now Malays in all services, performing various roles ranging from air force pilots to commandos. But now as I think back, I feel sad knowing that there were limits set on Malays, whatever the supposed justifications. Can you imagine how this would have affected the psyche of the aspiring Malay individual? The lesson here is that we have to fight discrimination in all its forms.”

Suhaimi seems eager to craft a narrative between those, including many in the establishment, who have long suggested that Singapore is a multicultural, meritocratic paradise—and others who, more fatalistic, might believe that racial prejudices are crippling.

There is increasing awareness in Singapore today about racism and bigotry, including everything from casual racism (e.g. “You’re really fair for a Malay”) to institutionalised and structural forms, including Housing Development Board policies that unintentionally disadvantage minorities in the public housing resale market.

While the establishment appears eager to encourage conversation on these topics, there seem to be two big caveats. First, the desire only for an ahistorical approach, one that looks to the future, and refuses to acknowledge the responsibility of Lee’s policies and words for contemporary prejudices. Second, a dislike for feisty anti-racism criticisms on social media and elsewhere. The government’s current anti-“cancel culture” campaign has in its crosshairs those who call out racism in a way unacceptable to delicate political ears.

Suhaimi said that he’s never directly felt, in conversations or work, that anybody cared about his skin colour. And in keeping with what’s sometimes called a “lemonades out of lemons” philosophy, Suhaimi is quick to point out how he’s benefited: hockey victories with his RI class, possibly when winning the Sword of Honour at OCS, and certainly at A&G. At the time the Monetary Authority of Singapore had decided to promote Islamic finance. Suhaimi’s boss told him to lead the development of the firm’s knowledge base on sukuks (bonds) and other instruments. “I wouldn’t have been given this opportunity if not for me being Malay and Muslim…so you just have to make the most of it.”

Suhaimi grew up in a Singapore where caricatures and stereotypes—“mat lepak, play guitar by the beach”—were regularly traded between friends. “I don’t think it’s meant to be taken seriously. It’s in many ways part of our heritage to be able to joke about some of these things. But I understand that it can be sensitive.”

All parties should exercise more care: “On the one hand, people must be more sensitive when making such comments. But on the other hand, I think people who receive and internalise or listen to those comments should also be a bit less sensitive about what it means. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions and say, ‘Oh, he’s being racist.’…it benefits us not to think that there’s an intention to that as well. The problem is if you’re the person to whom it was directed, it’s hard to judge the person, right? Because that’s what you feel. And you have a right to say what you feel. But the problem is that now because of social media, anything like this happens, and there’s immediately somebody who’s labelled as the bad guy.”

The obvious retort is that it’s easy for somebody with his privilege to brush off mat lepak stereotypes and forms of discrimination whose impact, intentional or not, might harm others more. Responding to that, he emphasises to me on separate occasions that of course there are forms of racism that must be addressed. But that, while doing so, it’s also important for us to appreciate the relative harmony we do have—never mind Habibie—and to keep an eye out for individual opportunities.

While he accepts and operates within our complicated racial reality, Suhaimi also looks forward to a post-race Singapore where, for instance, self-help groups like MENDAKI are no longer structured along racial lines. This clan- and race-based delineation of charity and welfare has its roots in Singapore’s early migrant population, when many communities, neglected by the British, realised the importance of redistribution among their kinspeople. Suhaimi points out that today most of the fundraising at MENDAKI and SINDA (Singapore Indian Development Association) is from Chinese donors, such as the Lee Foundation.

Suhaimi does occasionally get specific requests to work on projects for the Malay community, which he responds to when he can. “But actually, I’m more interested in helping Singaporeans generally, you know, who are in need of help.” Faris Joraimi, Jom’s history editor, said that in recent years some Malay Singaporeans, such as Fadli Fawzi of the Workers’ Party, have embraced this “raise all boats” vision.

Perhaps in line with this, Suhaimi is also unsentimental about cultural change, for instance with language. English is the predominant language in their household. Though his sons pick up Malay from their mum, they study Mandarin as a second language. The usual argument in Singapore for learning Malay, “to fit in with our neighbours,” he said, has decreasing salience: many in Malaysia and Indonesia, at least in the business world, want to communicate in English. It’s all just part of the natural evolution of languages, Suhaimi said—though noting that Zainul disagrees with him on this.

For over 10 years, since he was in his mid-30s, Suhaimi has volunteered on the boards of non-profit organisations. “Older board directors have told me straight in the face, ‘You’re too young to be a board director.’” He’s aware that he’s often sought after for his youth and ethnicity. “There are various degrees of tokenism and who you apply that to matters, what you don’t want is a situation where you maybe favour someone who is less deserving.”

Yet he framed the issue in terms of diversity as merit, one that traditional models may not capture. “You can say, I want this skill set, I want this kind of experience level. But how do you say the fact that he’s from a minority group brings value? It’s hard to crystallise…but more and more people are seeing that we want our boards to reflect our communities…we need more women, more minorities and more youth on our boards.”

The percentage of women on boards at Singapore’s top 100 listed firms has risen from 15.2 percent in 2018 to 20.8 percent by 2022, still far below what it is in the UK (39.1 percent) and US (31.8 percent), according to the Council for Board Diversity. Age and ethnic diversity isn’t tracked. According to Melissa Kwee, philanthropist and former CEO of NVPC: “Most boards lack diversity and voices which can expand their understanding of risk and multiple perspectives. Suhaimi is well considered and a desirable candidate because he bridges worlds; commerce and law, community and corporate, mainstream and minority cultures.”

Alvin Chiang, a corporate governance advocate and board advisor at Russell Reynolds Associates, told me that the emphasis being placed on minority representation may actually lead to the “overboarding” of minority candidates who are in particular demand.

Part of the reason Suhaimi has always felt the need to work extra hard is because he’s acutely aware of his privilege, and the immediate comparisons to his father, whose name is part of his and whose mannerisms he shares. Zainul is a pillar in the Malay community, having served as editor of Berita Harian, president of the Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura (MUIS, the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore), and CEO of Yayasan MENDAKI (Council for the Development of Singapore Malay/Muslim Community), for a spell holding all three positions concurrently.

Zainul is also respected across the political spectrum for, among other things, his humility, kindness and forthrightness. He was part of the losing PAP team to the Workers’ Party in the seminal 2011 election in Aljunied, the first time an opposition party has won a larger group constituency. While asserting that Singapore is fortunate to have the government it has, Suhaimi also said: “I think there’s huge value in having good opposition in Parliament. Maybe my dad was the ultimate sacrifice for that to happen.”

The respect and trust that others have for Zainul, both in the Malay and broader community, is often naturally imparted to Suhaimi too, he believes. Networks help open doors and smoothen processes, for instance, he suspects, with his seamless early career shift within A&G. This forces him to put his “best foot forward all the time” to deflect any suggestion of nepotism or bias, as occurred after he won the Sword of Honour. “That’s something that I think is hardwired in me, better work damn hard lah, otherwise malu right? But nonetheless, the opening of the door is a huge advantage.”

Predictably, many people, including Zainul, have asked Suhaimi to enter politics. In 2010-11 he attended a couple of PAP “tea sessions”, where he told the party that politics isn’t for him. “Never say never,” he told me, “but at the moment I just don’t see it…my wife is pretty clear that I shouldn’t do it.” Aside from the hectic schedule, they also don’t want to live their lives “under a microscope.” Suhaimi agrees that the civil service and political parties can no longer automatically draw “the best people”, but believes it’s beneficial for Singapore that talent is not concentrated but spread out. Moreover, he said, even if not the best, they still get “good people”.

Along with greater philanthropy from business leaders and individuals, all this feeds Suhaimi’s optimism that Singapore has what it takes to be—mimicking an NVPC slogan—a “City of Good”, one where “everyone is caring and other-centred; one where we are concerned for the society and our surroundings, whether it is the environment, our neighbours and our larger community; one where we do certain things not for ourselves but for the greater good.”

Suhaimi has long accepted the guidance of others, including his father, while then assertively charting his own path, whether in RI, the army or A&G. He is focused on doing good locally, but then also works in an industry accused by some of amorally capitalising on global financial opportunities, never mind the local impact.

He is conscious of racial and other prejudices but never feels hobbled by them, eager to exploit opportunities. Suhaimi effortlessly wears his Malayness and his pan-Asianness. He believes people should be given time to bloom but also relentlessly assesses their performance—including, of course, his own—and mentally sorts them, the “best people” and the “good people”. (And also the so-so people?)

On striving and free will, Suhaimi reflects a conservative’s emphasis on individual responsibility while also a liberal’s sensitivity to circumstance, to the notion that informed decision-making and pro-social behaviour are privileges not all may enjoy.

Some may see a negative conception of the politician here, the shape-shifter able to tailor their message to their audience. But there is also the positive conception, the person able to empathise with anybody, eager to see each human fulfil their potential.

Or maybe the reality is simply that Suhaimi defies easy categorisation, and it’s a boon to Singapore that he’s outside politics (thus far), for he’s helping to expand the non-political spaces and power centres that society needs.

Last week Suhaimi asked me out for lunch, not knowing when this profile would be published (already two months late). He chose North Singapore (By Miznon), a Jewish restaurant on Amoy Street where figs, challah and sautéed shrimp stare from polished white plates on beige tables at a loungey bar.

Suhaimi was taken aback when I insisted on paying my own way. “Journalistic ethics,” I said, especially since I’m working on this now. “You mean if I buy you lunch, you’re going to think I’m a nicer guy?”

Suhaimi quizzed me about Indian weddings because he was on his way to one in Mumbai, his first time in India. It sounded like it’d be quite the splash. Don’t bother about gifts, I told him. A physical one will be lost. An ang pao will be somewhat inconsequential. Just show up, that’s what the hosts will appreciate the most.

Tragically, he told me that he’d missed every single dance practice for the sangeet, the traditional pre-wedding-night dance fiesta. I was shocked. No, you must go for the last practice, I told him. Nobody will remember your ang pao; they will remember how you danced.

And as Suhaimi nibbled at his Jewish lamb kebab along Amoy Street while discussing Mumbai traffic, dress codes and dance moves with me, he asked me the same question he did three months prior at the Providore: “Why are you writing this again? What do you think Jom’s readers will be keen on? No, no, I’m not worried. I just don’t think my life is that interesting.”

Sudhir Vadaketh is Jom’s editor-in-chief. Additional research by Jean Hew. Photography assistance by Charmaine Poh.

Correction: an earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Suhaimi was Singapore's first ethnic Malay Sword-of-Honour recipient.