How To Suck Eggs

Don’t ever attempt giving needless assistance or presume to offer advice to an expert. If you prefer the wisdom of the phrase in verse, it goes like this:

Teach not thy parent’s mother to extract
The embryo juices of the bird by suction.
The good old lady can that feat enact,
Quite irrespective of your kind instruction.

There he was, the Singapore Foreign Minister K Shamugan telling the United Nations how to eradicate poverty and ensure sustainable development. He must presume that the august gathering never heard of our Gini coefficient of 0.478 (highest income inequality compared to the OECD countries), or the title of the Population White Paper justifying a 6.9 million squeeze into 710 square kilometers, "A Sustainable Population for a Dynamic Singapore".

It was Ed Meese who once said an expert is somebody who is more than 50 miles from home, has no responsibility for implementing the advice he gives, and shows slides. Shanmugam was not the first to teach the U.N. how to suck eggs. Kishore Mahbubani, former Permanent Representative to the U.N. and dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, also said earlier, "There are no homeless, destitute or starving people (in Singapore). Poverty has been eradicated."

And there was this boast that Singapore has trained over 80,000 government officials from 170 countries in areas including sustainable urban development. In the light of our world famous flash floods and mass rapid transportation system mishaps, those students had better take a second look at the lesson notes. Or walk into any public toilet of the city who tabled a resolution to designate November 19 as World Toilet Day, at the risk of puking at the level of sanitation that can be found.

As for the pompous advice to the world body to "rethink, retool our economies and societies," someone should repeat that while looking into a mirror. Better still, reflect on what Aung San Suu Kyi said during her recent visit here, "I want to learn a lot from the standards that Singapore has been able to achieve, but I wonder whether we don't want something more for our country."

Edging Towards The Abyss

Birth rates have gone up, evidenced by the total fertility rate (TFR) growing by a 1.29 rate, compared to 1.20 in 2011. That's a healthy improvement of 7.5 percent. Before you start grinning like the jackass you saw on the live TV forum, the news is not all good.

The non-residential population in Singapore continues to rise unabated. It reached 1.55 million in June, up from 1.49 million a year ago, swelling up the total population figure by 1.6 percent, higher than the 1.3 climb in 2004. Since this relentless pace of growth falls neatly within the 1.3 to 1.6 percentage range used by the notorious White Paper for a target population of 6.9 million by 2030, the horror is confirmed.

The prime minister's assurance in parliament that the 6.9 million number was not a target, but a projection, ostensibly a "planning parameter", has just been shot full of holes by the National Population and Talent Division (NTPFD) report. Member of Parliament Liang Eng Hwa had to rub it in with his Freudian slip, "at this pace, the grow is more sustainable".

6.9 million is not sustainable. Even with the present population figure of 5.4 million, they are unable to cope with the housing demand. The PM himself said the additional buses and trains "will take a few more years, 2015, 2016." And Education Minister Heng Swee Kiat still thinks it's perfectly alright to spend $36 million to import foreign students, to feed, educate and guarantee them a job, so they can take away our own youngsters' lunches. How did we come to this?

Oh, we remember.

"You know, the cure for all this talk is really a good dose of incompetent government. You get that alternative and you'll never put Singapore together again: Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again... my asset values will disappear, my apartments will be worth a fraction of what they were, my ministers' jobs will be in peril, their security will be at risk and their women will become maids in other people's countries, foreign workers."
(Speech justifying million-dollar pay hike for Singapore ministers, Straits Times, 5 April 2007)

A Rare Find

She was one of the odd hires made by SMRT CEO Desmond Kuek after the latter took over from Saw Phaik Hwa, an oddity in that she was not an ex-army buddy.

But Ms Kalai Natarajan had solid credentials, previously a director at Oglivy Public Relations Worldwide, and had been in the marketing communications and public relations business for no less than 18 years. Prior to Oglivy PR, she was Assistant Vice-President of Sales & Marketing for MediaCorp's TV12 and Head of Global Media Relations for Banyan Tree Hotels and Resorts. At SMRT, she was overseeing three departments with a staff of 50: corporate communications, marketing and media and passenger service.

So when she resigned after only 5 months on the job, without having to serve the obligatory 3 months notice period for senior management, and without another appointment lined up, tongues were wagging like the hanging power cables of a SMRT train mishap.

An HR expert speculated that there may have been a “cultural misfit” if senior management staff were “not on the same wavelength”. Or same battle dress uniform, since quite a few of the senior management new hires were former SAF personnel, mostly retired or close to retirement age, imported by Lieutenant General (NS) Desmond Kuek. Forced to choose between a little black dress or green army fatigues, the smart lady decided to fall out.

Her replacement has practically zero PR experience. Patrick Nathan, 51, had joined SMRT in 2011 as director for Security Operations and Readiness. Prior to that, he was at the National Security Coordination Centre (NSCC) shuffling papers on esoteric topics like policy, risk assessment and corporate communication. He has the one important qualification that matters to Kuek though. Nathan is a former career army officer who was with the Ministry of Defence for 24 years and 9 months. Officially he joined the SAF in 1979, promoted to colonel in 2004 and seconded to the NSC as deputy director until he "retired" in 2006. Old soldiers don't just fade away in Singapore, they are put out to pasture at SMRT.

You know what they say about Mussolini, at least Il Duce ("the leader") made the trains run on time. Unfortunately for us, the general in charge of Singapore just excused himself, "the trains will take a bit longer (new signalling, new lines, more rolling stock, etc)... that will take a few more years, 2015, 2016, but we are making a lot, as much haste as we possibly can." Sigh, there are generals and there are generals.

The Emperor's New Clothes

There is a "live" forum program that lives up to its name, and it's called "Talking Point." The pathetic facsimile organized by Channel NewsAsia (CNA) last night turned out to be a cosy fireside chat with moderators Sharon Tong and Walter Fernandez.

Lobbing softballs at the Prime Minister, both were obviously trying very hard to protect him from the "tough" queries emanating from the public.  What was shown on the television screen were saccharine sweet tweets from obsequious sycophants, the grassroots type worshippers who would have sent mangoes to Michael Palmer.

The CNA website did have some real hard questions meant for Lee, but they took them down quickly - probably for fear of losing their jobs. Three such samples that survived the deletion:

• Sir, do you know how stressful it is for us singaporean kids now? We no longer compete with our own people but foreigners as well. #askpmlee
• How to have work life balance when we are all slogging so hard to meet the high end living demands in Singapore? #askpmlee
• What can we do to promote racial harmony? Because, let's face it, racism is still common. #askpmlee

None of those above was aired, but of course that was expected. Still, one clever fellow managed to embed a paraphrased quote from Aung San Suu Kyi ("the visitor") to make it sound milder. What Daw Suu actually said was, "You can't expect everyone to agree with you, that is simply not possible... if you believe that what you are doing is good for the country, then you must be prepared to lose the next elections."

Lee nearly jumped out of his seat when the words sank in, and exposed the ugly self when he said he disagreed with the part about losing an election. In that priceless moment, we saw the emperor without his clothes.

The game was up, and the charade was painfully played out for the rest of the program. So much for wanting to forge a new way forward with all Singaporeans by answering questions “live”. Perhaps junior needs to take up private tuition lessons from the Burmese democracy icon who also said: “But transparency is linked to confidence. We need a leadership that has enough confidence in themselves to be transparent and enough honesty to accept criticisms and to meet it in the best way possible which is to say by redressing what needs to be redressed."

Liddat, how to rebuild trust between electorate and govt?

Secretive Communications

The Singapore Police Force (SPF) is busy refuting allegations in a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) World Service Radio interview concerning Singapore's (lack of) commitment to fighting match-fixing. BBC confirmed it had received a complaint from the SPF, "The BBC strives for balance and impartiality and in line with our editorial guidelines we asked the Singapore Police Force for comment but were not granted an interview. A similar request in March was also declined."

On another international front, the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) on Thursday wrote that SingTel has been facilitating access for the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) in a partnership with British, American and Singaporean intelligence agencies to tap undersea fibre optic telecommunications cables that link Asia, the Middle East and Europe and carry much of Australia's international phone and internet traffic.

The British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is also collecting all data transmitted to and from the United Kingdom and Northern Europe via the subsea cable that runs from Japan, via Singapore, Djibouti, Suez and the Straits of Gibraltar to Northern Germany. The SMH emphasised that access was facilitated through SingTel, which is publicly-listed but majority-owned by Temasek Holdings.

SingTel and Singapore's Ministry of Defence (MINDEF), in the manner of the SPF response to BBC investigations, have not responded to queries sent to them. The idiom "No smoke without fire" means that when people suspect something, there is normally good reason for the suspicion, even if there is no concrete evidence. To prefer to wait and then react to "allegations" is a curious choice. Have they learnt nothing from the haze inducing fires from Indonesia?

The news floating around the globe is consistent with The Guardian's newspaper report in June about the GCHQ interception program leaked by Edward Snowden, codenamed Tempora, that involves harvesting all data, emails sent and received, instant messages, calls, passwords and more, entering and exiting Britain via undersea fibre-optic cables. Australian intelligence sources have separately confirmed that their ASD and the highly secretive Security and Intelligence Division (SID) of Singapore's Ministry of Defence also play key roles in intercepting communications traffic through Asia.

Thanks, but no thanks

She didn't need access to the secretive stuff to appreciate what is going on in Singapore. After receiving briefings from the Ministry of Education (MOE) on Singapore's education system, and the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) on anti-corruption policies, Aung San Suu Kyi was sharp enough to conclude, "Myanmar should not seek to recreate S'pore's policies". No country deserves to be cursed with MOE scholars with proclivity for pedophilia, or CPIB officers misappropriating money for casino visitations. Or top civil servants with fetish for oral gratification. She acknowledged that corruption cannot be "rid off entirely", no matter how much the office holders are allowed to pay themselves. Instead, she suggested  Singapore could learn "from us", a more relaxed way of life. "Perhaps, warmer and closer relations," and she wasn't exactly recommending the practice of installing relatives in the Istana.