Opposition politician Chee Soon Juan has said it again that mistakes made by the Government led to a worsening of the Covid-19 crisis in Singapore.
In a video posted on Facebook on Thursday (April 16), the Secretary-General of the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) criticised Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his government for, at the beginning, instructing the people not to wear masks if they were well.
Dr Chee said Mr Lee’s second mistake was “telling people to go out and conduct our lives normally when he should have given clear instructions for everyone to stay home”.
However, he said, the “bigger problem is that when (PM Lee) realised that he was wrong, he couldn’t bring himself to tell everyone that it was the wrong advice”. The Government instead issued a “neither-here-nor-there statement that was as clear as the gravy in your mee siam”. It said: “The Government is no longer discouraging you from wearing masks.”
The SDP leader added that not admitting to wrongs was “the attitude of arrogance that comes with unchecked and unchallenged power that causes huge problems for this country”.
He said: “When you cannot admit to your mistakes, you cannot correct them.”
Dr Chee then pointed to the missteps before the spike in cases at the foreign worker dormitories, criticising the excuse given later by National Development Minister Lawrence Wong, who co-chairs the multi-ministry task force on Covid-19, that the authorities did not have the benefit of hindsight when it came to those cases.
https://www.facebook.com/cheesoonjuan/videos/841663292977668/
Referring to the activities of PAP politicians at a time when the people were being told to stay at home, Dr Chee pointed out that Mr K Shanmugam, Mr Desmond Lee, Mr Teo Chee Hean and Mr Goh Chok Tong were all out on walkabouts during the pandemic and introducing their party’s new candidates.
He added that, in contrast, the SDP had cancelled its 40th-anniversary dinner on Feb 8, an event that had been planned months earlier.
“So, Mr Lee will not apologise for telling Singaporeans not to wear masks, Lawrence Wong will not admit that it was an oversight regarding the foreign worker infections, and Dr Chia Shi Lu will not concede that he should not have gone to the hawker centre for a walkabout during the lockdown,” he said.
“This Covid crisis has forced us to confront this reality,” Dr Chee noted and called on the people to stand with him on his quest for political change in the country. /TISG