Last week, an opinion piece published on this website made an insightful analogy between actor, Will Smith’s now infamous slap and the Singapore’s ruling Peoples’ Action Party (PAP) Government. In his observations, writer, Tang Li noted that the Oscars had been declining in viewership but Smith’s well-timed, albeit ill-advised slap boosted viewership numbers.
In other words “bad things and a**eholes have a role to play in the scheme of things. When one is riding high on success, one can tend to get complacent. Instead of constantly seeking improvement, one gets comfortable with past successes and spends time running away from new challenges, thereby leading to stagnation.
In the context of the PAP Government, the focus has been to ensure “our best and brightest never face a serious challenge, thereby ensuring the best brains rot in a deluded cloud of self-entitlement (“I am successful” because of something I did 20-years ago, not because I am constantly working at it”).”
There have been many examples of this playing out in recent years. For example, the Government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been criticised as “reactionary” rather than proactive or visionary. And till this day, the promised review of how the Government dealt with Covid-19 at the “right time” has still not materialised.
Has the 4G leadership found themselves in a position whereby they had inherited a reputation of competence without necessarily having proven the same in their own right?
Recently, Minister for Finance, Lawrence Wong, was accused of being “out of touch” by netizens over his refusal to reduce or suspend fuel duties or to provide road tax rebates despite the rising costs of living that affect many Singaporeans.
“It seems he lost touch with people on the street. What about people who drive taxis, phv [private hire vehicle drivers] or deliveries (sic) drivers? Are they better off group? These people have lost daily taking of $50 or more after petrol price gone up. On top of this, daily food price have (sic) also gone up”.
Are the 4G leadership trained to look at the country with fresh eyes? Or are they simply trotting out tired and unimaginative solutions to problems they do not understand because the system is geared to protect them from actually facing the baptism of fire that makes great leaders?
It may also be that many of our national institutions face a similar problem. Let us look at The Straits Times (ST). The ST has long had the reputation of being a mouthpiece of the Government with a pro- PAP slant. Its journalistic integrity and the quality of its reporting have been criticised for being one-sided and lazy.
Now that the ST is no longer a for-profit company but a publicly funded institution that should be rightly accountable to the public, has anything changed?
In February this year, the ST’s print edition omitted a few paragraphs from a Reuters report which included that the Singapore Government may have been one of the early customers of Quadream, an Israeli surveillance company. Considering the gross intrusion of privacy, this should have been the crux of the story which any news outlet worth its salt would want to highlight. The fact that the national paper would omit this fact is curious. Is this symptomatic of an entire system working in concert to protect those in power from ever having to deal with the consequences of its actions?
Recently, an ST reader criticised the paper’s coverage of a “racist-islamophobic attack” for seemingly prioritising the narrative of the attacker over the narrative of the victims of the attack. While this may have been an oversight, one does wonder if the oversight would have occurred had the paper been in a less protectionist system.
Just over a year ago, then CEO of Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), Ng Yat Chung came under fire for unprofessionally losing his cool when asked an entirely reasonable question in relation to whether or not the SPH restructuring would result in a “pivot to emphasise editorial integrity, for example, ahead of advertiser interests”.
Ng’s outburst displayed shocking entitlement – almost as if he could not believe that state-affiliated institutions should ever be subject to any questioning. Has our system become so molly-coddled that even asking a reasonable question could lead to such a disproportionate response from the CEO?
In focusing so much on pretending that it knows all through its “ownself check ownself” system, has our Government and institutions become totally unable to face challenges? Are we wasting opportunities and resources by crushing questions instead of learning through facing challenges head-on? The fact that lessons can be learned from mistakes is not a new concept. Yet, our Government and its institutions may never benefit from such lessons if it is structured in such a “head buried in the sand” way.
The idea that “we are so clever that we can never make mistakes” is an artificial and wholly unrealistic one. It is also counterproductive and we are the poorer for it. /TISG