Halimah Yacob’s presidency has been tainted.
The eighth President of Singapore will continue to be haunted by an
electoral process that pushed her into a whirlpool of vitriol as
her status as a Malay was questioned and her financial nous put
under the microscope.
The 63-year-old made a strategic error in
choosing to contest the presidential election as the government’s
unofficial candidate. Today she stands accused of all kinds of
cruel charges that are not worth mentioning here. Now we have an
Elected President with an asterisk. Pity Halimah.
I met her thrice. Each time, she impressed
with her genteel nature and her desire to do good to workers and
the disadvantaged. One of these occasions was when I took a group
of Asian journalists to meet her. They were in Singapore as part of
a three-month fellowship programme. They came out impressed with
the way she spoke to her constituents who had gone to see her as
part of her meet-the-people session.
If she had fought an open election, she could
have won it without much difficulty. If Prime Minister Lee Hsien
Loong had not manoeuvred too hastily to change the rules of the
game and if he had understood his populace better and managed the
process smartly, we would be celebrating Singapore’s first woman
President and a tudung-wearing one at that. Pity Singapore.
The run-up to the election has inflicted a
serious wound, especially on Malays, which will take a long time to
heal. There are enough Malays who feel that they have been turned
into political pawns in the People Action Party’s game to stop
presidential hopeful Tan Cheng Bock from contesting.
Many Malays have questioned the very basis of
this election. In the first place, they didn’t feel the need to
have a Malay President and even if they felt the need they would
have preferred one who contested on equal terms, not on a
preferential basis. By putting such a high bar — experience of
managing a company with $500 million shareholder equity in the last
three years for private-sector candidates — the government must
have known that getting qualified Malays to contest would have been
an impossible task.
Even if there were individuals who would have
qualified, not many would have wanted to fight the government’s
unofficial candidate. PM Lee said confidently when he was asked if
there were Malays who would qualify, “There are qualified Malays,
there are qualified Singaporeans.” Today those words are being
ridiculed.
Worse, there was so much scrutiny on the
Malayness of the three contestants that forced many Malays to ask
themselves whether there was a true-blue Malay among
themselves.
This debate is something PM and his team had
never expected and it shows how the government had been totally
blindsided by an electorate that would chuck the official narrative
aside and let their counter narrative prevail. The implications are
huge as the government’s control of its message will be muddied and
muddled by a population that will use social media to press their
points of view.
If there is one political lesson to be learnt
by the government from this badly-thought-out exercise it is this:
Don’t take Singaporeans for granted.
Writer’s note: This is my first commentary
on the Elected Presidency. I and two others were in the media team
helping presidential hopeful Salleh Marican and felt conflicted
about it. Now that our engagement with Salleh is over, I am free to
write. I have not used any information from my work for him in this
article.
P N Balji is a veteran Singaporean
journalist who was formerly chief editor of Today, as well as an
editor at The New Paper. He is currently a media consultant. The
views expressed are his own.
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