Sunday, 24 April 2011 at
22:14
You guys were once my heroes. When I
was young, I was so proud that I had a government that was indeed
one of the world's best, if not, THE BEST. Although LKY was (and
still is) portrayed as a fearsome, if ruthless leader, he was much
respected. When he appeared as our PM on the world stage, my heart
never failed to swell with pride because it was obvious that he was
also someone other world leaders respected.
But not now. The problem is, you are victims of your own success.
And the world has changed, yet you remain stuck in the 1960s. This
is why your once-fantastic branding is being eroded, why I find it
hard to support you like before.
1) You were too
successful
First, there was LKY and he was a great leader. He was like a god
and still being treated like one. He "miraculously" transformed a
small, poor, resource-less little island into a country that now
has one of the highest GDPs in the world, where other countries are
now trying to learn from. No one can take that achievement away
from the first PAP team and indeed, I would guess that this is also
the main reason why many in the older generation are still your
loyal fans. I may not agree to all the strategies you've used then
(and some were downright questionable) but I can't deny that you
had some very good reasons to do so. But unfortunately, when you've
set the standard of governance so high, every other subsequent PAP
team that comes along can only look worse and worse. And it doesn't
help that you constantly try too hard to be perfect. The higher the
bar is set, the more difficult it is for the PAP teams that come
after to match it. In a way, I think LKY only does his own team a
great disservice by publishing so many personal memoirs, recounting
again and again how good he was. Because the more god-like he is,
the more voters like me will wonder, how can we ever have another
"god" like him to lead us? And the answers you propose will always
be a disappointment. Because, against a god, everyone will look
like a mere mortal. Didn't anyone tell you that you can't replicate
a god using your same old cookie-cutter?!! Great leaders are first
of all rebels, don't you know (and LKY was one too!)?
2) You were too
smart for your own good
No one can or has been able to rival you in terms of your (mostly)
rational and well-thought through, sound policies. Especially in
terms of our economic policies. You're so darn good with your
cost-benefit analyses, your economic forecasts, your financial
planning. Every policy you rolled out is justified using very
rational arguments that the opposition and the public find hard to
counter argue. You are top-notch, because you have a very brainy
team, all with impeccable qualifications from world renowned
universities. Unfortunately, this made you assume that only you
have the brains and everyone else is just an idiot who needs only
to listen and obey. The game of politics cannot be played by cold
logic alone. And it certainly can't be won by treating your voters
as morons.
An example of this would be the issue of bringing in the IRs. Yes,
your cold, rational argument makes very good economic reasons for
having casinos in Singapore. No one can argue against that. But not
everything can or should be measured by dollars and cents or by the
amount of GDP it will generate for Sg. We're no longer the
generation in the 1960s that constantly had to worry about money or
material matters. We've moved up the Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
In fact, most Singaporeans work ridiculously long hours, are
constantly too stressed to even go on dates or have sex (hence the
low marriage and fertility rate) that we're all very very
disillusioned with the constant drive for wealth. Increasingly, we
want to slow down, have time to smell the flowers and be with our
families. And having casinos that will bring in more crime
(organised ones too), encourage more addictive behaviour and
increase broken families will not sit well with a population who
now values quality of life rather than personal wealth. Yet, you
bull-dosed these concerns and won yet again with your cold,
rational, economic arguments because there wasn't enough opposition
in the parliament to stop you.
While people may buy into the cold logic of your policies now, your
lack of empathy and human touch are slowly alienating voters. The
breaking point may not be now, but you can be sure that the
disconnection is getting wider by the day. It's a time-bomb that
will go off at some point.
3) You forgot
evolutionary laws, history and your own
past
While you're very brainy, you're mostly all technocrats and
specialists. You've scorned the social sciences and the humanities,
you think these are only for sissy people whose A Levels don't
qualify them for specialist degrees. Yet, if you had been more
well-informed in these areas, you might have learnt some valuable
lessons about power. History, for example, is the best teacher that
could have taught you that power never ever ever ever lasts
forever. Indeed, the more you try to hang on to it, the more it
will invite adversity. History would also have taught you that
every regime was once in opposition. As Marx could have told you,
the history of mankind is all about class (or power) struggles. You
may be in power now, but one day you'll be overthrown. However, you
have hope of leaving your great legacy behind if you take a leaf
from the pages of human evolution, which would have taught you that
it's human diversity that has helped the human race to overcome the
odds, to survive this long. But instead of embracing diversity, you
tried your hardest to kill off any form of alternative views,
whether these come from within your party or externally. You only
wanted to hear your own voice or voices that are exactly the same
as yours. This inbreeding will eventually be your demise. Most of
all, you forgot your own roots, where you were once an opposition
party too. You focused so much on hanging on to your power, you
forgot your original vision, you forgot your voters and you forgot
why you are governing Singapore.
4) Power breeds
fear and paranoia
In the beginning, you used power in order to stabilise the
political situation so that you can give the masses homes, food,
clean water and their livelihoods. That seemed a justifiable use of
power even though it involved some ruthless and ugly tactics. But
over the years, you started to crave power for itself. Again, you
forgot the story of Macbeth (see, I told you the humanities are
important!!) - where an originally good leader was so obsessed with
his new power that he saw everything as a threat towards it. He
became so paranoid that he even killed his best friend whom he
thought was after his throne. He only heard what he wanted to hear
from dubious soothsayers (which turned out to be half-truths).
Needless to say, Macbeth eventually had a tragic end. Like Macbeth,
you've become so obsessed with winning overwhelmingly in every GE
that you use every weapon you have, every trick up your sleeves to
clobber the opposition to smithereens. Smear campaigns, legal
suits, changing electoral boundaries, raising the cost of
candidature, forming GRCs, threatening the electorate with
upgrading...it's like watching the Brazilian football team beat the
Singapore team by 82-2, except in football the rules are fairer and
the referee neutral. Why do you need to resort to such
gangster-like ways? You could have won overwhelmingly anyway with
all the talent you have! I'm not sure how long this bullying
strategy can go on but sooner or later you'll become the thug that
the electorate can't wait to get rid of.
5) Power
corrupts absolutely
Power is not power without money. And in this aspect you've outdone
yourselves by pegging your salaries to the private sector. You're
the highest paid politicians in the world and your income is >40
times that of the median income of the general population (only
less than Kenya). Of course, you justify it with yet another one of
your cold, rational arguments of attracting and retaining the best
talents in the government. But seriously, how can you compare
public sector salaries to the private sector? In fact, many of your
candidates have never worked in the private sector before and one
wonders if they'll survive even for a day in a private company.
Yet, they are paid private sector salaries, paid not from profits
but from taxpayers' money. And though I fully agree that
politicians must be paid their worth, don't you think getting 40x
the median income is crossing into the lines of corruption? Ok,
even if all our Ministers and PM are worth every cent of their $4m
annual salary, it also means that they have to perform much much
much better than any other government in the world. Again, you have
set the standards and expectations so high, you only have
yourselves to blame when you cannot meet those expectations from
the ground. And the more you fail to meet their expectations, the
more the electorate will think you're not worth your astronomical
salaries. It's a vicious cycle that you've started and it's going
to be very hard to stop now.
You talk about the so-called "crutch-mentality" of the poor, yet
this same mentality can be applied on yourselves. When you've used
money as the main means to attract people into your party, you've
basically recruited people who value money above serving the
country in the people's interest. These politicians who are in it
for the money will not have the incentive to think independently or
to represent the people's interests because they've got millions to
lose if they don't toe party lines. Because they're paid millions,
what incentives do they have to empathize with someone struggling
with 2 jobs to make ends meet? Very soon, the voters will feel that
you're just a bunch of corrupt officials, no different from those
in many 3rd-world countries.
The way I see it, you only have yourselves to blame for this
situation you're in. The only way you can somehow reverse these
trends is to learn from Madonna (see, you never thought popular
culture could teach you anything right?). She keeps herself
relevant not by sticking to the same old formula again and again.
That would have killed her career long ago as it did to countless
of other pop stars. Rather, she keeps re-inventing herself and her
image to keep them relevant to the current times. And she pushes
the boundaries. She's always ahead of her time and like a true
leader, she sets the trends not follow them. She's a rebel. Yet,
all you have done is to remain exactly the same as you were in
1960s. The electorate is increasingly tired of your same old scare
tactics using HDB upgrading as a stick, tired of you saying that
Singapore will go to ruins if the opposition wins, tired of you
always using smear campaigns against opposition candidates, tired
of your arrogance and lack of empathy, tired of you giving out
inconsequential hongbaos before elections only to increase your own
salaries by millions after.
You keep encouraging us to think out-of-the-box, yet you're
perpetually stuck in the same adversarial mindset towards the
opposition. If you can only start to think of your relationship
with the opposition as a mutual symbiosis - you share a portion of
power with them in return for your longevity and credibility. Power
is always temporary, but your legacy needn't be. Just look at the
current Conservative Party of UK which traces its roots back to the
Tory Party in 1678. Do you think they could have survived this long
without any meaningful opposition, no defeats, no radical internal
reforms? Are you so politically shortsighted that you can only see
your future in the next 10, 20 or 50 years? C'mon, think further!!
And didn't anyone tell you that in other to be the best, you need
to have competition? Otherwise, how can the electorate be sure that
you're indeed the best, if they can't compare you to any other
party?
I'm no military strategist, but I do think that sometimes, you need
to lose some battles first in order to win bigger battles later. It
will not be a bad thing for you to lose a few GRCs in this GE. In
fact, if I were you, I will be celebrating. Because nothing gets
people going like failure. Rather lose some small battles now than
to wait for the big bomb to explode later. By then, not only will
you disappear into the dust heap of history, so too will Singapore.
That will be your ultimate betrayal to this country that you so
painstakingly and successfully created out of a little red dot on
the map.
