Myanmmar Times: Singapore’s PM-in-waiting commits a major blunder

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Singapore’s PM-in-waiting commits a major blunder By Roger Mitton | Monday, 09 February 2015



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Things have taken a distinct turn for the worse for Singapore’s long-ruling People’s Action Party, which is often, and naively, touted as super-efficient and incorruptible.

Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong speaks to reporters on February 3. Photo: AFP

In a way, it’s the Lance Armstrong Syndrome: No one thought an all-American boy who won the Tour de France seven times, beat cancer and raised funds for charities could be a dope-fuelled, lying, thuggish cheat.

Those who tried to reveal the truth were often ridiculed – at least, until the facts piled up and Armstrong’s denials became increasingly implausible until finally he confessed.

So it is with Singapore, and the likewise ridiculed attempts to unveil the real situation. But listen up, for those attempts received an unexpected boost last week from Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
Interestingly, he homed in on the very thing that people often mention when they try to convey what they regard as being so admirable about the place: its litter-free cleanliness.

Everyone knows the stories about former PM Lee Kuan Yew stopping his limo to pick up some litter he’s spotted on the pavement. These days, though, the poor chap would not get to the end of the street.
His son, the current PM, recently berated his fellow Singaporeans for leaving piles of litter on the ground after an outdoor concert last month.

He contrasted this with the behaviour of Myanmar’s civic-minded football fans, who picked up their litter after the national team played Singapore last November.

Lee was not the only one to get fired up. His predecessor, former PM Goh Chok Tong, warned that the country could end up as a “garbage city”.

“Our reputation as one of the world’s cleanest cities is going down the rubbish chute. It looks like a case of ‘monkeys see, monkeys do’,” Goh said. “Cleanliness is a character thing. It shows who you really are.”
Unfortunately, there is growing evidence that Singaporeans are not a clean lot. Their own leaders even compare them to monkeys.

Another minister later revealed that 19,000 summons for littering were issued last year, more than double the number in 2013.

Singapore’s clean image seems to be going the way of Armstrong’s and as if that were not bad enough its economy has dipped.

Even the famed strength of its dollar has taken a beating. The Singapore currency has fallen dramatically over the past six months, dropping almost 7 percent against the US dollar – a greater depreciation than even the Indonesian rupiah. Financial analysts predict it will stay weak for the first half of this year, in part due to worsening problems at home.

Last month, Singapore’s Business Optimism Index dropped to its lowest level in two years, while a sudden jump in interest rates threatens to further weaken the already languishing domestic property market.
As well, exports are struggling, tourism is flat and not only have the two massive new casinos seen their profits plummet, but they have contributed to increased drug-use, crime, corruption and, yes, littering.
In response, PM Lee has proposed stern new anti-corruption measures.

Oh, you thought there was no corruption in Singapore? Well, think again, for several recent high-profile corruption cases involving senior officials have shattered that myth.

Transparency International now ranks Singapore seventh in its Corruption Perceptions Index, down two places in the past three years.

Naturally, resurgent oppositionists have tried to take advantage of the government’s woes and they have been helped by the stumblebum performance of a man many tout as Lee’s likely successor, the Social and Family Development Minister Chan Chun Sing. His farcical escapade began when Chee Soon Juan, the secretary-general of the opposition Singapore Democratic Party, wrote two articles for the Huffington Post, an online news portal in the United States.

In his first piece, Chee noted that in 2003 he had warned that the free trade agreement Singapore signed that year with the US would only help the business elite to exploit cheap labour.

He claimed that the evidence after more than 10 years has proved that he was right: Income inequality in both countries has become horrendously high and in Singapore is even worse than in the US.

The city-state, said Chee, has the highest proportion of millionaires in the world, yet nearly 5 percent of its workforce has a pitiful annual income of less than US$5000.

For good measure, he added that Singapore’s pension system is broken and that a generation of workers is in danger of having an insufficient retirement income. He blamed all this on the lack of democratic rights in Singapore – and he followed up that theme in his second article which focused on what he alleged is Singapore’s repressive and highly controlled media.

It was over the top and would not have rated much attention had Chan, the PAP’s rising star, not decided to fire off an ill-considered rebuttal.

In his lengthy missive to the Huffington Post, Minister Chan ignored the points made by Chee, but lambasted the website’s decision to publish them.

“You perhaps believe he is a weighty political figure in Singapore. He is nothing of the kind,” said Chan, adding that Chee is a “political failure” who has fought and lost three elections. He claimed Chee only writes for the overseas press because “foreign journalists don’t know him as well as Singaporeans and he believes he can beguile them into believing he is the Aung San Suu Kyi of Singapore politics”.

Wow. In fact, it was Chan’s rant that seemed to thrust a Daw Aung San Suu Kyi-like aura over Chee, who is an intelligent man but a flawed politician.

Still, given Singapore’s deepening problems and the way its leaders treat him, it is not unlikely that Chee and many of his opposition colleagues will defeat their PAP rivals in next year’s general election.


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