Whilst recently passing a happy half hour in the dentist’s waiting room, I came across the article below, published in a British magazine I won’t name, for fear of it being banned in Singapore:
Letter from Singapore
From Our Own Correspondent
There are countries where the people in charge have to take responsibility for the mess they make. Singapore, where times have been particularly tough in recent years, isn’t one of them.
First came the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s. Then the terrorist attacks of 11 September hit our tourism sector, which was given a second body blow by the outbreak of SARS. Unemployment and GDP are worsening while rates for utilities, public transport and our Goods and Services Tax (GST) are all increasing.
Now we learn that the payments our employers make into the Central Provident Fund (CPF) – which is used to pay for our mortgages, medical bills and retirement – are also to be slashed in a bid to make Singapore more competitive for employers. Many of us wonder how we’ll make ends meet.
By contrast, the fat cats in government have no such worries. In a country where the average annual salary is US$15,500, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong earns a healthy US$600,000 – more than George W. Bush or Tony Blair. Not bad in a country the size of your Isle of Wight with a population of just four million.
Many of us grumble privately that we’re having to shoulder the burden of economic reforms as Singapore tries to compete with cheaper upstarts such as India and China, while our politicians live the high life. But rumbling is about all we can do. We’ve been ruled by the People’s Action Party (PAP) continuously since 1959 and are managed with an iron rod by our founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, and his entourage.
We do have opposition MPs but they are a rare and some would say fool hardy breed. J.B. Jeyaretnam, for example, the former secretary-general of the tiny opposition Workers’ Party of Singapore, has had seven defamation actions brought against him by Prime Minister Goh since 1997, thereby bankrupting him. This meant he lost his seat in parliament and his licence to practice law.
So we tend not to grumble too loudly. And even if we were to grumble loudly, it’s unlikely the Lee dynasty’s grip on power might end any time soon. When Lee Kuan Yew “retired” as PM in 1990, he established a new position of Senior Minister for himself. This influential advisory cabinet post enables Lee to pull the strings from the sidelines. Now his handpicked successor, Prime Minister Goh, has announced that he is planning to retire and will soon hand power over to …. Lee Hsien Loong, Lee Kuan Yew’s son, whom most of us dislike. A recent unofficial online poll – “If you could vote for the next Prime Minister, it would be…..” revealed that just 12 percent of us voted for Lee younger.
It also looks as though the two Lees will be in power simultaneously. We had expected Lee the elder to step down so Prime Minister Goh could take up the Senior Minister’s job. But the octogenarian has other ideas. Lee, who once said he would rise from the grave to sort out any problems that might emerge in Singapore after his death, has announced that he intends to stay in public life as long as he is fit.
“I will retire from office when I am no longer able to contribute to the government,” he said in an interview with the Straits Times recently. “You don’t have to tell me. I can feel it when I am no longer making a contribution.”
Should the elder Lee remain Senior Minister while his son is Prime Minister, between them they would occupy the two top government posts in one of the richest nations in Southeast Asia. To tighten the Lee family’s stranglehold further, Lee junior’s wife, Ho Ching, is head of Temasek Holdings, a state investment firm that controls many of our leading companies such as Singapore Airlines and Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel). Talk about keeping it in the family! It could in fact be that cozy couple who are strangling the pilots in SIA, but that’s just what I have been told….!