Ngiam Tong Dow's interview with
Susan Long from The Straits Times.
Since Mr Ngiam Tong Dow retired from the civil service in 1999,
affairs of state have weighed heavily on his mind. The highly
respected former Permanent Secretary worries about Singapore’s
long-term survival and the kind of society the next generation will
inherit. At 66, the HDB Corp chairman insists he is ‘no radical’,
just a concerned Singaporean with three grandchildren, who wonders
‘whether there will be a Singapore for them in 50 years’ time’. In
Tea with Think, a weekly interview series, he gives a candid
appraisal of the civil service, and his prognosis of what the lack
of an alternative political leadership means for Singapore. The
interview will be continued next week.
Q. With all this pessimism surrounding Singapore’s
prospects today, what’s your personal prognosis? Will Singapore
survive Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew?
A. Unequivocally yes, Singapore will survive SM Lee but provided
he leaves the right legacy. What sort of legacy he wants to leave
is for him to say, but I, a blooming upstart, dare to suggest to
him that we should open up politically and allow talent to be
spread throughout our society so that an alternative leadership can
emerge.So far, the People’s Action Party’s tactic is to put all the
scholars into the civil service because it believes the way to
retain political power forever is to have a monopoly on talent. But
in my view, that’s a very short term view. It is the law of nature
that all things must atrophy. Unless SM allows serious political
challenges to emerge from the alternative elite out there, the
incumbent elite will just coast along. At the first sign of a
grassroots revolt, they will probably collapse just like the
incumbent Progressive Party to the left-wing PAP onslaught in the
late 1950s. I think our leaders have to accept that Singapore is
larger than the PAP.
Q. What would be a useful first step in opening
up?
A. For Singapore to survive, we should release half our talent –
our President and Overseas Merit scholars – to the private sector.
When ten scholars come home, five should turn to the right and join
the public sector or the civil service; the other five should turn
to the left and join the private sector. These scholars should
serve their bond to Singapore – not to the Government – by working
in or for Singapore overseas. As matters stand, those who wish to
strike out have to break their bonds, pay a financial penalty and
worse, be condemned as quitters. But it takes a certain temperament
and mindset to be a civil servant. The former head of the civil
service,Sim Kee Boon, once said that joining the administrative
service is like entering a royal priesthood. Not all of us have the
temperament to be priests. However upright a person is, the
mandarin will in time begin to live a gilded life in a gilded cage.
As a Permanent Secretary, I never had to worry whether I could pay
my staff their wages. It was all provided for in the Budget. As
chairman of DBS Bank, I worried about wages only 20 per cent of the
time. I now face my greatest business challenge as chairman of HDB
Corp, a new start-up spun off from HDB. I spend 90 per cent of my
time worrying whether I have enough to pay my staff at the end of
the month. It’s a mental switch.
Q. What is your biggest worry about the civil
service?
A. The greatest danger is we are flying on auto-pilot. What was
once a great policy, we just carry on with more of the same, until
reality intervenes. Take our industrial policy. At the beginning,
it was the right thing for us to attract multinationals to
Singapore. For some years now, I’ve been trying to tell everybody:
‘Look, for God’s sake, grow our own timber.’ If we really want
knowledge to be rooted in Singaporeans and based in Singapore, we
have to support our SMEs. I’m not a supporter of SMEs just for the
sake of more SMEs, but we must grow our own roots. Creative
Technology’s Sim Wong Hoo is one and Hyflux’s Olivia Lum is another
but that’s too few. We have been flying on auto-pilot for too long.
The MNCs have contributed a lot to Singapore but they are totally
unsentimental people. The moment you’re uncompetitive, they just
relocate.
Q. Why has this come about?
A. I suspect we have started to believe our own propaganda.
There is also a particular brand of Singapore elite arrogance
creeping in. Some civil servants behave like they have a mandate
from the emperor. We think we are little Lee Kuan Yews. SM Lee has
earned his spurs, with his fine intellect and international
standing. But even Lee Kuan Yew sometimes doesn’t behave like Lee
Kuan Yew. There is also a trend of intellectualisation for its own
sake, which loses a sense of the pragmatic concerns of the larger
world. The Chinese, for example, keep good archives of the Imperial
examinations which used to be held at the Temple of Heaven. At the
beginning, the scholars were tested on very practical subjects,
such as how to control floods in their province. But over time,
they were examined on the Confucian Analects and Chinese poetry
composition. Hence, they became emasculated by the system, a
worrying fate which could befall Singapore.
Q. But aren’t you an exception to the norm of the gilded
mandarin with zero bottomline consciousness?
A. That’s because I started out with Economic Development Board
in the 1959. Investment promotion then was all about hard foot
slogging and personal persuasion, which teaches you to be very
humble and patient. I learnt to be a supplicant and a professional
beggar, instead of a dispenser of favours. These days, most civil
servants start out administering the law. If I had my way, every
administrative officer would start his or her career in the EDB.
Hard foot slogging.
Q. YOUR idea of creating an alternate elite is not new.
What do you think of the oft-mooted suggestion of achieving that
splitting ranks within the People’s Action Party?
A. Quite honestly, if you ask me, Team A-and-Team B is a
synthetic and infantile idea. If you want to challenge the
Government, it must be spontaneous. You have to allow some of your
best and brightest to remain outside your reach and let them grow
spontaneously. How do you know their leadership will not be as good
as yours? But if you monopolise all the talent, there will never be
an alternative leadership. And alternatives are good for
Singapore.
Q. In your calculation, what are the odds of this
alternative replacing the incumbent?
A. Of course there’s a political risk. Some of these chaps may
turn out to be your real opposition, but that is the risk the PAP
has to take if it really wants Singapore to endure. A model we
should work towards is the French model of the elite
administration. The very brightest of France all go to university
or college. Some emerge Socialists, others Conservative, some work
in industries, some work in government. Yet, at the end of the day,
when the chips are down, they are all Frenchmen. No member of the
French elite will ever think of betraying his country, never. That
is the sort of Singapore elite we want. It doesn’t mean that all of
us must belong to the PAP. That is very important.
Q. What do bad times mean for the PAP, which has based
its legitimacy on providing the economic goods and asset
enhancement? Is its social compact with the people in need of an
update?
A. Oh yes. And my advice is: Go back to Senior Minister Lee Kuan
Yew’s old credo, where nobody owes us a living. After I had just
taken over as the Housing Board’s chairman in 2000, an astute
academic asked me: ‘Tong Dow, what’s your greatest problem at HDB?’
Then he diagnosed it himself: ‘Initially, you gave peanuts to
monkeys so they would dance to your tune. Now you’ve given them so
much by way of peanuts that the monkey has become a gorilla and you
have to dance to its tune. That’s your greatest problem.’ Our
people have become over-fed and today’s economic realities mean we
have to put them on a crash diet. We cannot starve them because
there will be a political explosion. So the art of government today
is to wean everyone off the dispensable items. We should just
concentrate on helping the poorest 5 to 10 per cent of the
population, instead of handing out a general largesse. Forget about
asset enhancement, Singapore shares and utility rebates. You’re
dancing to the tune of the gorilla. I don’t understand the urgency
of raising the Goods and Services Tax. Why tax the lower-income,
then return it to them in an aid package? It demeans human dignity
and creates a growing supplicant class who habitually hold out
their palms. Despite the fact that we say we are not a welfare
state, we act like one of the most ‘welfarish’ states in the world.
We should appeal instead to people’s sense of pride and
self-reliance. I think political courage is needed here. And my
instinct is that the Singaporean will respect you for that.
Q. So what should this new compact consist
of?
A. It should go back to what was originally promised: ‘That you
shall be given the best education, whether it be academic or
vocational, according to your maximum potential.’ And there will be
no judgment whether an engineer is better than a doctor or a chef.
My late mother was a great woman. Although illiterate, she
single-handedly brought up four boys and a girl. She used to say in
Hainanese: ‘If you have one talent which you excel in, you will
never starve.’ I think the best legacy to leave is education and
equal opportunity for all. When the Hainanese community came to
Singapore, they were the latest arrivals and the smallest in
number. So they had no choice but to become humble houseboys,
waiters and cooks. But they always wanted their sons to have a
better life than themselves. The great thing about Singapore was
that we could get an education, which gave us mobility, despite
coming from the poorest families. Today, the Hainanese, as a
dialect group, form proportionately the highest number of
professionals in Singapore.
Q. You say focus on education. What is top of your
wishlist for re-making Singapore’s education system?
A. Each year, the PSLE creams off all the top boys and girls and
dispatches them to only two schools, Raffles Institution and
Raffles Girls’ School. However good these schools are, the problem
is you are educating your elite in only two institutions, with only
two sets of mentors, and casting them in more or less the same
mould. It worries me that Singapore is only about ‘one brand’
because you never know what challenges lie ahead and where they
will come from. I think we should spread out our best and brightest
to at least a dozen schools.
Q. You advocate a more inclusive mindset all
around?
A. Yes, intellectually, everyone has to accept that the country
of Singapore is larger than the PAP. But even larger than the
country of Singapore, which is limited by size and population, is
the nation of Singapore, which includes a diaspora. My view is that
we should have a more inclusive approach to nation-building. We
have started the Majulah Connection, an international network where
every Singaporean – whether he is a citizen or not, so long as he
feels for Singapore – is included as part of our diaspora.
Similarly, we should include foreigners who have worked and thrived
here as friends of Singapore. That’s the only way to survive.
Otherwise, its just four million people on a little red dot of 600
sq km. If you exclude people, you become smaller and smaller, and
in the end, you’ll disappear.
Q. What is the kind of Singapore you hope your
grandchildren will inherit?
A. Let’s look at Sparta and Athens, two city states in Greek
history. Singapore is like Sparta, where the top students are taken
away from their parents as children and educated. Cohort by cohort,
they each select their own leadership, ultimately electing their
own Philosopher King. When I first read Plato’s Republic, I was
totally dazzled by the great logic of this organisational model
where the best selects the best. But when I reached the end of the
book, it dawned on me that though the starting point was
meritocracy, the end result was dictatorship and elitism. In the
end, that was how Sparta crumbled. Yet, Athens, a city of
philosophers known for its different schools of thought, survived.
What does this tell us about out-of-bounds markers? So SM Lee has
to think very hard what legacy he wants to leave for Singapore and
the type of society he wants to leave behind. Is it to be a Sparta,
a well-organised martial society, but in the end, very brittle; or
an untidy Athens which survived because of its diversity of
thinking? Personally, I believe that Singaporeans are not so kuai
(Hokkien for obedient) as to become a Sparta. This is our saving
grace. As a young senior citizen, I very much hope that Singapore
will survive for a long time, but as an Athens. It is more
interesting and worth living and dying for.
