Have we seen any capable ministers like Dr. Goh Keng Swee in
1970s who was able to restructure the economy to address major
threats and challenges.
Year after year since 1970s, we only hear our ministers during deep
recessions talking about the same problems with the economy they
could not solve or have failed to solve.
In earlier recessions, we already heard them talking about need for
workers to upgrade their skills and many agencies were set up
supposedly to upgrade the workers. What have these various agencies
done and have they succeeded or are doing the right things in the
right direction?
Our leaders have only talked about in recent years only old
assumptions and presumptions about talents and ministers' worth and
giving excuses with look-good presentations of some more measures
and justifications, will they solve problems?
Have the ministers come up with a strategic economic master plan
which will be fine-tuned with committed work processes and
responsibilities at every department to make it work. (This call
for effective strategy and implementation processes has been made
for years to the FBU)
Yet the ministers keep talking about their talents and abilities in
every election despite such failures of past promised economic
restructuring. The domestic sector of the economy was the worse hit
during all the past recessions. With all the pro-foreign investment
incentives and job opportunities being open up to foreigners
without any form of priority to its own citizens, have MOM Ng
really worked for the people of Singapore?
If our million-dollar ministers are capable as presented in
election, then they should understand why the old problems as
identified in every recession committees did not work. Is it the
domestic sector is suffering from high cost of doing business and
this problem was not admitted in the past to cover up
failures.
The new MPs and ministers should not keep repeating the same old
solutions or pushing away problems. They should not keep quiet
about old assumptions which did not work. They should make the
leaders understand certain shortcomings in their mindset and go
about addressing big mistakes in policies?
Somewhere and somehow the leaders after receiving their
million-dollar increments in salaries and bonuses have gone soft
and complacent although they gave the impression that they have
many more policies coming all the time. This state of complacency
can be seen in their constant self-praises and auto-piloting of
assumptions in policies which did not work.
We can see that how this state of complacency have affected many
ministers in past cases of major policy errors and
negligence.
Often only the lower rung officers were made scapegoats who might
have no control or power to implement certain measures:-
Just take a look at how the ministers have answered to some of the
recent major policy errors and mistakes in implementation:
(1) Failures to deliver solemn promises made over the years in
various committees and inquiries due to public outcries and
big-scale retrenchments etc.
(2) Failures to restructure the economy to value-adding
technology-driven strategy to address structural unemployments and
losses of business competitiveness due to wrong policies creating
high costs of doing business.
(3) Failures to change the highly academic elitist education system
to broad-based practical knowledge application as posted to FBU
since 2002.
(4) Serious multi-million Pocketing of monies by various GLC and
other public employees e.g. overtime claims of pilots and cabin
crew by SIA employee amounting to Millions
(5) Serious Corruption cases not deliberated in public to solve
underlying problems of accountability and transparency e.g. project
manager in Choice Home projects
(6) Million-dollar losses involving taxpayers' monies e.g. Temasek
in various ventures overseas, million-dollar losses by
Mediacorp/mediawork in 2002-2004, HDB's. PSA's and SIA's
multi-million losses due to failure to implement accountable and
transparent work processes to address costs.
(7) Hotel New World and Nicol Highway collapses due to negligence
on the part of BCD in ensuring proper certification of structural
submissions before issuing permit to commence work.
(
SP's computerization mess resulting in stoppage of
billing for months.
We were told by MM Lee in parliament that ministers were worth
million-dollar salaries as that will attract able and capable
people from the private sector CEOs and captains of industries to
join politics but are they capable given this kind of major
problems. In the private sector such mistakes would immediately
result in resignations of CEOs but in the above-mentioned cases of
bigger mistakes at national level, no one is taking responsibility
to stop the policy errors or correct past wrong doings.
We want to have accountability and transparency in managing of the
country. Where there is a lack of committed work processes where
the decisions are ad hoc, and conceptual likely to cause future
repetitions of mistakes and problems, the leaders must be made
answerable.
Now and for many years, the leaders will continue to avoid
answering to past major errors as posted in the "20 major policy
errors of government".
To rub salt into the wound, ministers in the face of such errors
are still being paid super bonuses without objective performance
assessments by some independent panels. Will the same minister
talents in private sector get such bonuses when they make this kind
of major mistakes as posted in the foregoing?
The system runs like this:
(1) Elecction - making all sorts of promises to reach Swiss
standard of living, creating jobs, claims to have talents to
restructure the economy to up-adding technology-driven economic
strategy, etc
(2) Ministers - making policies of all kinds but were unable to
oversee or implement them except by making claims of all kinds of
talents and abilities.
(3) Failures to achieve results for 1997 - 2002 - explained
everything away by blaming on people's lack of training and skills
(SPRING/WDA/EDB were supposed to have started training schemes for
past twenty years and what happened)
(4) Defending every errors by making sweeping replies which did not
address underlying problems e.g. Hotel New Wrold safety problems
persisted in Nicol Highway collapse and many other similar
accidents.
