The YoungPaP has held its 17th Youth leadership training course
on 2.8.2007 as posted on its website.
The Youngpap must have witnessed no doubt the various problems
confronting the country of late from NKF malpractices to government
ministries' incurring financial losses in many projects due to
negligence and carelessness as reported by Auditor General and
recently to Shin Corp losses etc.
Are the Youngpap's Youth Leadership training course aimed at
providing solutions to problems facing the country citizens ?
If not then the citizens will be left wondering what is the purpose
of such training if they are not producing the desired results to
turn things around.
What is leadership, talents, insight, foresight ? Are leadership,
foresight or talents some form of self-centredness or
assumptions?
Are all the policies constantly uttered by the leaders too
conceptual and unattainable being based on too much look-good
assumptions.
Are policies like meritocracy, leadership, pragmatism, anti-welfare
taxing and back-charging of all costs to citizens producing the
intended results or are people being made to suffer from policies
which are no longer working but only causing rising costs of living
and loss of economic competitiveness.
Are we building a country where the people are being over-taxed
causing our very own domestic economy losing competitiveness for
years.
Are we still building a country based on the philosophy of bringing
about the greatest benefits of the greatest number?
Should we continue to allow this type of talk-only conceptual
leadership while ignoring and passing over genuine problems as
unsolvable or just to allow such conceptual leaders to get
by?
Are our leaders still as committed as before to sacrifice for the
people by working towards bringing about the greatest benefits of
the greatest number instead of his own benefits?
Are our leaders interested in building up a system of government
which could be participated by the citizens based on
accountability, balanced roles, checks and balances, codes of
conduct, using objective pre-defined independent assessments.
Are our government leaders working on feedbacks of the people to
solve the rising costs of living which are already setting back our
competitiveness.
Should such leaders keep the political power to themselves given
the above-stated problems and issues and still be excused from all
the suffering and wrongs.
Despite many years of rhetorics, and lately from ministers'
utterances of nonsense in refusing to grant permit for holding
cycling event by WP while allowing youngpap to hold such similar
event, it has become increasingly clear that the government has
degenerated into one of legalistic wrangling of laws and
regulations to maintain political control, taxing and recovering
costs and even profiteering depriving people of essential services
like medicare, utilities, education, housing, transportation
etc.
As a result of such a system of autocratic government, the country
has taken a setback since the 1970s with its own domestic economy
stagnating, dropping wages, young and educated unemployments.
The domestic economy is being squeezed out of their survival by
government's getting into businesses of all sorts to compete with
its own citizens.
What happen to all the talents of our own citizens or do we have no
talents?
In the fast-paced technology, we need to build collective or
distributive leadership whereby all policies and decisions of
government are not resting on the desires or self-centredness of a
few leaders but are distributed or decentralised through
pre-planned work processes to be performed by the whole government
team.
Only when a leadership system is so translated into down-to-earth
implementation processes with accountability and check and balances
will it lead to broad-based participation and knowledge application
by the all with the support of the masses.
Therefore considering the above-stated circumstances facing the
country as a whole our leaders today should be in possession of not
only directional visions or foresight but more importantly they
should possess the quality to make good accountable decisions and
have the implementation ability to translate all policies and
decisions to broad-based knowledge applications and teamwork.
We will need to leaders who were able to empathise with people's
problems and suffering as expressed in feedbacks such as the "20
major major government policy errors" given to the Feedback Unit
since 2002.
We need ministers and civil servants who could come down from their
ivory tower and be able to solve many problems we are facing and to
restructure the economy to value-adding technology-driven economy
talked about for years.
Perhaps youngpap members who have attended such training courses
should share with all whether they have indeed received the kind of
leadership training to help solve problems or only to qualify them
to gain their own internal promotion.