Najib Faces Conservatives in Post-Election Test: Southeast Asia

As the son of a pencil factory worker, Abdul Wahid Omar grew up in poverty in Malaysia’s southern state of Johor with 10 siblings after his family left Singapore in 1969.

Good test scores won him a place in a boarding school with a bed of his own, helped also by a national policy to boost the lot of ethnic Malays and indigenous people, who are about 60 percent of the population. A government scholarship led to a British accounting degree, as Abdul Wahid went on to run Malaysia’s biggest bank and become the government minister overseeing economic planning.