Welcome to 2022. What lies ahead in this new year, with Covid-19 still around and Omicron threatening to upset plans to get back to normal? My quick and frank answer: I am not a clairvoyant. I do not know.
And what about 2021?
This column – Sense And Nonsense – was started in March 2017 (“Amos Yee is now really famous”) to capture what the talking point was for each week. The column is written on Saturday and I will look back on the week’s news and try and make some sense of what is happening. Cut through all the noise and BS and talk about what matters – to me as a humble concerned citizen and to other like-minded Singaporeans.
Today’s simple piece will be my first look back – at the year’s columns and not on the week’s developments. If the column is still around in January 2023, it will do likewise with a 2022 retrospection.
What was hogging the headlines in 2021? Not that many different issues, actually.
The top, still ongoing, story is Covid-19. There were 15 Sense columns on the pandemic and its repercussions.
It has always been a hydra-like saga from way back through 2021 to the start of 2020.
This is the story of the pandemic’s existential threat to lives and how Singaporeans are coping with it at the healthcare level – what is being done (vaccines and boosters) to protect residents and to maintaining and enhancing the healthcare system.
This is the story of the deep and wide impact on Singapore’s economy – on almost every sector and industry, in particular, on tourism which is still struggling to get rid of the cobweb of inactivity.
This is the story of disruption and individual survival – losing jobs, reskilling and facing a new post-Covid 19 world.
The 2021 Covid-19 year is also the story of the 4G leaders and the Multi-Ministry Task Force. Week after week, Singaporeans continue to watch Lawrence Wong and company trot out the numbers and try and explain their attempts to contain Delta (and now Omicron) as they navigate the country to safer waters.
The bigger story being played out, with Singapore in transition, as mentioned by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in his New Year message, is who will be the next PM. Who can deliver the goods, who is top leadership material, who can connect with a new generation of younger voters.
This is the continuing story of Singapore and where it is heading.
In a fairly muted year dominated by one massive multi-headed crisis, the only other development which got more than one column (three Sense columns), was the fall of ex-Workers’ Party Sengkang GRC Raeesah Khan. After the drama of her confession in Parliament that she lied came even more drama at the Committee of Privileges hearings. She claimed that Pritam Singh told her to take the lie to the grave. The WP secretary-general point-blank denied having said that. Two other senior WP leaders, chairman Sylvia Lim and vice-chairman Faisal Manap, confirmed, as far as they knew, no such instruction was ever given.
The other COP drama – caught in the exchanges between Edwin Tong, Minister for Culture, Community and Youth and Second Minister for Law, and Pritam Singh – centred on why the WP leaders had not acted earlier to force Khan to admit to her lie in Parliament. Singh said he and the other two WP leaders were, rightly, more concerned about her well-being. Singh said he made a judgement call to let Khan have space to deal with her problem and take responsibility to correct her lie.
Other than Covid-19 and Raeesah Khan, it has been a relatively quiet get-your-act-together year. CECA reared its head briefly. And, oh yes, badminton star Loh Kean Yew made us proud when he became world champion. (I did not write on him, maybe I will wait for him to win the All-England or an Olympic gold). Nevertheless, well done. Hail Kean Yew, our second prominent LKY.
Happy New Year – and may 2022 be kinder and gentler.
Tan Bah Bah, consulting editor of TheIndependent.Sg, is a former senior leader with The Straits Times. He was also managing editor of a local magazine publishing company.