Rebranding Singapore

Who would have thought it, Yale and Singapore share a common ancestry. Ishaan Tharoor tells us (TIME, 15 Oct 2012, "Illiberal Arts") that an East India Company employee, Elihu Yale, donated the equivalent of £562 in kind to an obscure college in Connecticut to help build the school that now carries his name. The other East India Company employee more familiar to us, Sir Stamford Raffles, turned an idyllic fishing village into the metropolitan monstrosity that is uniquely Singapore. If you think that's a harsh descriptive, contemplate why the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts (MICA) has gone ahead to spend big bucks on a worldwide tender (“Public Relations Plan to Enhance External Perceptions of Singapore”) for public relations companies to rebrand Singapore. The official excuse offered: the Lion City has gained a “reputation for being safe, clean, efficient and pro-business”, but there “still exist some misconceptions and a substantial lag between reality.”

We'll ignore for a moment the ugly rumours of financial shenanigans in the deal for Yale, the training ground of five U.S. presidents, destination of choice for aspiring political leaders and scions of influential industrialists. Yale is mired in controversy for compromising "the spirit of the university as a center of open debate and protest by giving away the rights of its students". The angry rhetoric refers to the admission of Pericles Lewis, first president of the Yale-National University of Singapore (NUS) College, that students on the Singapore campus will not be able to stage political protests or form political parties. If it's an incubator of world class political minds you're after, head for New Haven, Connecticut.

Mr Jorg Dietzel, CEO of Jorg Dietzel Brand Consultants, who will probably be bidding for the juicy MICA tender, said common misconceptions of Singapore include how the country supposedly lacks freedom, and was boring and sterile. The exercise may prove to be an interesting experience, in the spirit of the rename Marina Bay effort. After wasting more taxpayers' monies, Singapore could be rebranded as ............ (drum roll) .............. Singapore!