Indonesian Acts in 'Giving Back to Society'
By LIZ GOOCH
Published: March 18, 2012
SINGAPORE — "You have to give people the bait, not the fish," said Tahir, the founder of a vast Indonesia-based business empire. "The fish, you can finish it in a week. But you give them the bait — the talent, the education — they can use this for their whole life."
Mr. Tahir, founder of the Mayapada Group, whose interests include banking, property, hospitals and media, has poured millions of dollars into universities, often in funding for needy students and most recently medical research.
While there is a growing culture of giving to higher education institutions in Asia, Mr. Tahir takes a more hands-on approach than many other donors.
Mr. Tahir, who came from a humble background, is now seeking to impart what he has learned on his way to becoming a tycoon whose net worth Forbes estimates at $1.4 billion. He is also the first Southeast Asian to sit on the board of trustees of the University of California, Berkeley.
Mr. Tahir, born in the Indonesian city of Surabaya in 1952, says his family struggled financially during his early years, when his parents ran a pedicab business, leasing the three-wheel vehicles out to drivers.
By the time Mr. Tahir had finished high school, his family could afford to send him to university, although his academic career would feature a few false starts. First, he tried civil engineering at a university in Surabaya but only lasted a semester. Then he went to Taiwan, where he had been accepted into medical school, but he only stayed a month before his father fell ill and he returned home.
At the age of 20, Mr. Tahir found his calling at the business school at Nanyang University in Singapore. Every month he would return to Surabaya with products from Singapore department stores — women's clothing, children's bicycles — and capitalize on Indonesians' desire for imported goods to help fund his schooling.
He returned to the classroom at 35, completing a master's degree in finance through an overseas program offered by Golden Gate University at Singapore Management University. Mr. Tahir said his belief in the importance of education had only grown over the years.
"The strength of a family, or the country or an organization or business entity does not just purely depend on the current management but more it depends on how you prepare the future generations to take over," he said in an interview in Singapore.
Mr. Tahir, who serves as the deputy chairman on the board of trustees at Pancasila University in Jakarta, has donated about 30 billion rupiah, or $3.27 million, to 10 state universities in Indonesia, mostly in the form of scholarships for needy students.
He is planning to donate 10,000 laptops to underprivileged Indonesian high school students who rank in the top 5 percent academically, at a cost he estimates at $3 million.
"We see around us so many needy students," he said. "They lost the opportunity to go to school. I think that inspired me. We have to pay more attention to education."
Mr. Tahir said he "owed" Indonesia because the country had given him the "chance to make a living, to feed my children and now I have a little bit of achievement."
"So taking from society, giving back to society — I think this is a very core principle of the Eastern values," he said.
Mr. Tahir's largest donation to date has been to the National University of Singapore. He donated 30 million Singapore dollars, or about $24 million, this year for medical research. Mr. Tahir, a Singapore permanent resident, said he had an "emotional relationship" with the university because it was akin to his alma mater and because his son is an alumnus. (Nanyang University merged with the University of Singapore to form the National University of Singapore.)
"The Singapore education system is good, so a lot of Indonesians come to study in Singapore from primary school up to university level," he said.
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