Part Two of same interview on 12Oct 2003
Stop dancing to the tune of the gorilla.
By Susan Long.
Part Two of the much-talked-about interview with ex-civil servant
Ngiam Tong Dow
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.
