Failure of the Singaporean Republic

This is the third and final letter to the Prime Minister of Singapore criticising him for his multiple failures. This letter ties in quite nicely into the current nonsense of the presidential walkover, which is just a symptom of systemic governmental rot discussed in the letter below.

Begin forwarded message:

From: sean ng

Subject: Re: Failure of the Republic

Date: 7 September 2017 at 19:20:00

I recently returned to Singapore for an extended period of time — my aunt had become grievously ill. She has since died. Her parents, my grandaunt and granduncle, were principally responsible for raising both my sister and me as our parents were quite busy working. In her life, my aunt was a model citizen — studying hard, then working tirelessly, eventually reaching senior management in an MNC through the sheer effort of thirty years of thirteen-hour workdays, whilst still living with and caring for her aged parents. She took care of and comforted my granduncle until his death and her estate — meticulously structured, without our knowledge, even as she lay on her deathbed — will provide for my grandaunt and my uncle, her brother, until the end of their lives. She even had provisions in place to reimburse people for her funereal expenses, not that any of us would ever exercise them.

I do not look for meaning in this — there is none. Death is death. But I bring up her example because she was what you might term an ideal Singaporean, living up to the meritocratic ideals of our society, raised by the emblems of your father’s era. My grandaunt and granduncle used to live in a kampung on Pulau Bukom before they moved to the chap lau chu. My granduncle, who worked in the Shell oil refinery until he lost his hearing in an industrial accident, died in the chap lau and my grandaunt, aunt and sister moved directly across the road when the old flats were slated for redevelopment. Your father chose the site of the chap lau chu himself; he was idolised by my grandaunt and granduncle: all his books adorn our shelves to this day and support for the party has never wavered. He was their contemporary, their hero, their leader. But with each successive generation, something was lost. What faded was not loyalty to the country or the party, we all lived through incredible successes and change — and nobody cared for the opposition or what they did or said, we knew they had nothing to offer. But the unquestioning faith, the surety of purpose, the sense of life getting better has dimmed. We didn’t want to see it at first. But in the end, the tumours grew too large to be ignored. The party might never have been infallible, but its descent into failure and irrelevance is recent and undeniable. You have led us to a ledge. You have charted no course forward and there is no turning back to a simpler form of living. All we can do is fall. Into darkness, into mediocrity, into nothing.

I do not lionise the past: I know there has never been a better time to be alive, that Singapore represents, in many respects, the current peak of human civilisation. I concede this freely; I have worked and lived all over the world and have never encountered a better functioning, more comfortable society. But I also know that a single, isolated data point is meaningless. I see no upward trajectory — you celebrate incremental gains that barely keep us afloat whilst our life raft floods and our society diminishes. It is not a question of strength — though you have none, having imperilled our national security in all the ways I described in the first letter and many others that are so apparent that need no mention. Nor is it a question of intelligence, which you and your mandarins have in spades, but as we will discuss, even its glimmer has faded. What is lacking is leadership, vision and empathy.

It always shocks me that those who seem to have the least empathy for the poor and vulnerable amongst your ranks are those who have risen from the relative privations they were born into only to wholeheartedly adopt the philosophy that had been oppressing them: if I can make it into RI, study overseas and then attend the Civil Service College, why can’t others? This despicable line of thought is only one of many perpetuated by your ministers and senior civil servants, who have grown sheltered and craven, it is also a desperately narrow viewpoint, a marooned and nonsensical understanding of success that has, nevertheless, permeated our society. But what I want to address today is far greater than the societal rot you have imposed — it is a massive blind spot we all share: that we cannot conceive of your end.

To be clear: are you indispensable? Is your party? Of course not. Yet, why can I not imagine a Singapore, as we know it, where this is so? If your party were to collapse tomorrow — and it might as well do so — what would become of the island? Are we really so weak that we cannot do without a self-decried and self-imposed superior class? This supposed cream of our society, long curdled by continuous exposure to the sun? A house of cards built on sand. We all feel the lash of the east wind on our cheeks. The storm approaches. And so it goes.

But let me straightforwardly qualify the impending collapse of your party and how you have doomed us all:

1. Intellectual Rot and Lack of Talent
I touched on this briefly in the last letter, but to reiterate, there is an absolute dearth of ideas and talent in the party. I am not some intellectual titan or government scholar but it is clear to me that the carcass of your brain trust has been picked clean and now stands as a temple to your misrule, its ivory ribcage towering over a society taught to cower in its shadow. Now, I have met some truly exceptional civil servants, dedicated in their mission to the public. But both you and I know that one does not achieve power by doing their job well — if that were so, then how would one find the time to build coalitions and shore up their power base? And once in power, one does not stay there by inviting challenge.

The long-telegraphed handover to this watered-down fourth generation is a running joke. Tell me, what qualifies Tan Chuan Jin to be the Speaker of Parliament or Chan Chun Sing to be the Prime Minister-in-waiting except for the fact that you said so? Posting a picture of you two from years past is not a credential. Have they demonstrated intelligence, dedication to the public or electoral prowess? Or are those just qualities that you have accorded to them in your statements in the media? You are not some self-evident truth, some undeniable cornerstone of reason or natural law from which all else derives its validity. I challenge the public to name a single achievement of your anointed successors — a true achievement, not some collective endeavour bestowed upon because the opaque governmental unaccountability that you have fomented. That they are trustworthy and good stewards is a non-statement: almost all Singaporeans are clean and have never engaged in bribery or fraud or would even presume to do so. That Chan Chun Sing told Bloomberg that finding talent for the government has gotten harder now that Singapore is more successful is perhaps the most moronic thing I have heard since SGD 600,000 was worth one peanut. Was he making a pre-emptive and ominous excuse for his portended reign as Prime Minister? “Talent” is harder to find because, like stray dog seeking others whose anal glands have similar flavour profiles to their own, your party looks for people in all the wrong places with all the wrong tools. You have suborned the party and moulded it in your image; in turn, those who form your government only need pass your smell test. This is not renewal. This is not passing the torch. It isn’t even perpetuation. It is the facsimile of a facsimile. All contenders to your narrow orthodoxy have been smothered. Four generations of intellectual inbreeding and untrammelled PAP thought have broken the back of the country’s leadership. This is your legacy.

2. Entrenched Interests and Oligarchy
Let us leave aside all questions of nepotism: you are undeniably smart and qualified. But do you acknowledge that being the son of the Prime Minister granted you certain advantages in life that were not available to others? Put another way, would you be sitting in the Istana if you were JBJ’s son instead of LKY’s? How many hurdles have you not had to overcome? I don’t need to hear your answer to that, nobody does, except perhaps you. But let us instead address the fact that our core value of meritocracy inevitably breeds inequality and will eventually lead to oligarchy: wealth is compounded and passes down through generations, and with wealth comes power, advantages and opportunities that are, literally, not afforded to others. And over time, the upper class becomes ossified, landed and permanent. You claim to refresh your ranks by inviting rich people from the private sector and high-flyers from the civil service and armed forces to enter the political fray. But meritocracy and thinly-veiled elitism have led to all these persons to originate from more or less the same pot. Even if RI and RJC admit students from outside the upper classes, batches are still overwhelmingly comprised of those from the richest, most-connected and most-powerful families. And they, in an act of intellectual and moral self-preservation, then proceed to indoctrinate and inculcate a faux sense of superiority — reinforced by the national narrative — amongst their less-well-to-do peers: you made it because you deserved to. You are exceptional because you are exceptional. You are here because of you.

Since success on the island is still measured in economic terms, it is not an uncommon assumption that to be rich is to be smart. To be rich is to be good, to be worthy. So I ask: would it matter if your ministers’ parents worked at McDonald’s for a living? Of course it wouldn’t. Yet, the children of fast-food workers are not particularly predisposed to enter your cabinet, instead, it is the children of bankers, lawyers, doctors, generals and, yes, politicians who dominate those ranks. You might not have created this permanent superclass, but you are a product of it. And you are too weak to overcome a system to which you are entirely beholden. You might even be incapable of understanding its dangers and flaws. But since the party has been tied irrevocably to the elite, the failure of either will topple the entire system. Leading the charge into oblivion are some of your truly tone-deaf ministers, like Shanmugam, whose auto-laudatory sacrifice of earning a low-seven-figure salary instead of a mid-seven-figure salary was so compelling that he was overcome by it and had to share it with the public. To be clear, I think civil servants should be well-paid and, functionally, ministerial salary is a miniscule portion of the government budget; you could probably pay yourselves more if your attitudes didn’t disgust the public so much and the populace felt they were getting their money’s worth. But it’s strange isn’t it? We all thought meritocracy would allow for better social mobility, but perhaps all we can hope for is a better-socialised nobility. You and your peers sit above us, aloof and unquestioned, passing private-sector jobs and government posts between you — again, I do not allege corruption, just systemic rot. If you were so true, so right, so deserving, why not say this, why not confront the seething and resentful populace with the self-evident truths of your rule? Say it: we rule because we always have and this is so because it is so. But you don’t: you make supposedly humanising but actually banal platitudes and hide behind the curtain of technocratic rule. It is almost as if you are being wilfully blind. What is it that you are afraid to see? That you are actually perched atop nothing than thrones of mere glass? You needn’t worry so: your right to rule is protected by more than money.

3. Supermajority
The fitting conclusion to your intellectual cloistering and incestuous relationship with the elite is the establishment of the durable and eternal Supermajority. So durable, in fact, that it has fair odds of outlasting the republic. As with the section above, let us not take easy potshots and make use of common refrains — in this case, gerrymandering and judicial independence: they are merely the icing on the cake when your party can amend the constitution at will and draft retroactive laws. Control of parliamentary procedures and a pliant media are just overkill when there are no term limits, no accountability and no oversight. Supermajority does not necessarily entail corruption, but it is corrupting. I recall, in an interview about the CPIB, you walked yourself into a “who watches the watchmen” conundrum; but you handwaved it away, implicitly citing your ironclad dedication and your literally unquestionable integrity.

But let us focus on practical maters instead of philosophical ones. You probably do not concede any of these points — though I would appreciate and hope that you actually have some form of counterargument — but the Supermajority is a fact. Plain as day. Perhaps there are other ways of achieving this without intellectual rot and the enshrinement of the elite — but I can think of none. And saying that the results garnered by your party entitle you to rule is a basic logical fallacy. Just because there has never been a typhoon with wind speeds above 315 km/h does not mean there will not be one. The past is often not a useful predictor of the future. Maybe you can point to the paucity of the opposition and, yes, they are pathetic. But that isn’t really a reason for you to rule either, merely that they should not. Independent of all the frankly disgusting ways it was engineered, Supermajority ensures that the party will never held in check. You may cite that the party must account for itself in regular elections but I call your attention to the fact that those who lose may be (and have been) appointed to any number of statutory boards, civil service positions such as Ministers of state or to any of the government-linked companies, all of which are directly or indirectly under your thumb. Singapore will continue to be your playground, perhaps in perpetuity. I posit that the strength of the Supermajority is such that, were the PAP to collapse tomorrow, or even in a few years’ time, the opposition would outright decline to form a government. They know they cannot govern, they know that they cannot possibly have the mandate of the public. They do not have the faintest idea about how to craft and implement sound fiscal policy or ensure that there is adequate housing stock or navigate a global crisis. Your constant fear-mongering of “regret, ruin and repentance” are true. Does this please you? Since there are no viable alternatives to your Supermajority, you have now become the government by default, destined to decline and enter new troughs of governance, only to be returned to power in smaller and smaller landslides. The party is the government is the party. We are all tied to you, without recourse; and we will all eventually join you in slipping over the event horizon. There is no insurance for cascading systemic failure.

It elicits contempt in me to consider that Chan Chun Sing will succeed you. Much more contempt than I felt for you when you succeeded Goh Chok Tong. To me, he is the standard-bearer of the new, less robust, more out-of-touch PAP, having matured in the cosy alcove of your absolute rule. I argue that you have accrued far more power, far less openly than your father: we all saw you waiting in the wings for years, building your power base, and despite his prescient statements about needing to judge you more harshly since you were the clearest symbol of his legacy, we have not done so. We the people have let you assemble a party and government beholden to your whim. But you are not without merit: your stewardship may have been meek and incremental, but the ship is aright: your true failing has been in choosing your successor. Chan Chun Sing is not moulded in your image: he is an inversion of leadership, assuming the mantle not by skill, intelligence or even by chance — it falls to him by default. He is the dwindling of the citizenry, distilled and filtered to such an extent that he hardly resembles a small-town mayor, much less the Prime Minister of a sovereign state. Now, he might not become Prime Minister, but I put it to you that he and all his ilk are of the same debilitated brood, with too little moral or intellectual fabric to even catch the wind of public opinion.

How did the people allow such a monstrous conclusion to come to pass? We’ve hardly had a say in it. It is precisely because of the reasons enumerated above that we cannot course correct. The combination of these factors have backed us down a path from which there is no return. The wheel is locked, the die is cast: all that remains is to lash our broken bodies to the mast. And since you will not, or cannot, turn from this path, I must now advise you on your options and hope that you will allow the republic to come to a graceful end, and not to be encased in the amber of the fourth generation’s idiocy, privilege and lack of self-awareness. Singapore will not survive, not in its current form. But I have thought long and hard to give you three options that would preserve some semblance of quality of life and security for the populace. I do not condone any of them — though they are preferential to the long twilight that awaits us now — but I do firmly believe that the government must now pursue and explore all three in tandem in order to ensure the survival of the people:

A. Corporatocracy
I have long-suspected this to be the endgame for many who are currently in power. A corporatocracy would finally legitimise the oligarchy and allow it to ascend to a true oligopoly. This may be engineered by the conversion of Singapore (finally) into Singapore Inc., where this new holding company buys out all citizenships in exchange for residency permits with shareholder benefits: your mandarins can calculate the correct price for that, perhaps SGD 3 million per citizen. Everyone would then be a resident, entitled to one share in Singapore Inc. and would receive dividends from this grand holding company i.e. a minimum basic income, which would tie to the populace even more tightly to the success of the economy. I admit, this would be somewhat of a libertarian, Randian utopia: as the state would no longer exist and all services would be privatised. This is not to say that the poorest would suffer — there would be no more poverty — and everyone would be able to elect which portions of the economy they would like to allocated the SGD 3 million in their mega-share to: they could be shareholders in defence and security industries, educational ones or transport and infrastructure. It would be up to them. Conversely, they would not receive services they were not subscribed to and the safety net would no longer exist. Though I find this option particularly distasteful, it would allow for a more radical form of democracy: with underperforming CEOs being easily removed through EGMs. There would probably be a weak executive (itself a corporation) dedicated to coordination functions. But for the corporatocracy to truly thrive, Singapore Inc. would have to sell itself as the seat and secretariat of a truly globe-spanning free-trade union, deeper than the TPP, perhaps some form of Indo-Pacific Free-Trade Agreement. Singapore would be ahead of the curve and were this experiment to work, it would lead to the toppling of many nation-states. But though the concept of the nation-state is archaic and on its last legs, this is a particularly cruel set up — as corporate takeovers, from the Exxon in Nigeria to the VOC, are rarely bloodless — but it would allow Singaporeans to thrive economically and live on in relative peace.

B. Merger II
A subtler destruction of the nation-state is for Singapore to subsume itself into a Confederation of Independent Systems, firstly with Malaysia, then perhaps with the rest of ASEAN. However, this requires deft manoeuvring as you would have to convince at least Malacca, Penang, Sabah and Sarawak to declare independence as well. Failing that, there is the less-dignified option of simply re-merging with the Malaysian Federation as an autonomous state: Singapore would be quite able to settle almost all outstanding Malaysian debt since its economy has grown larger than Malaysia’s and even negotiate a settlement where it may be the federal capital. The island would then have a massive supply of immigrants whose culture is essentially the same as ours, though corruption, graft and disregard for the rule of law would need to be weeded out. The idiocies of a Chan Chun Sing administration would then surely be washed away by the necessity to participate in a federal system and the influx of new immigrants would allow for a true renewal in leadership. But merging with Malaysia does have numerous risks: it is plagued with poor governance and fiscal management, its leaders often make use of racial and religious policies and it has a rotating monarchy whose appetites will need to be curbed. Though, if anyone can make it work, it would be Singaporeans. And it would be our next great endeavour — success would grant us a massive hinterland and the chance to be a true regional and global power but we would have sacrificed much of our self-determination, self-respect and will have swallow the bitter pill that our independence was folly. But hoping that two fraying halves can make one whole may be a pipe dream: that this union could be the mere sum of its parts would, in and of itself, be a massive victory.

C. Presidential Republic
This option the closest to the status quo; though with less risk, comes less reward. It is also the option that requires the least adjustment and would be the least damaging to the Singaporean psyche. But it would also resolve the least amount of problems and leave the oligarchy largely intact. But I propose this because you and your party have poisoned parliament, accruing far too much power to themselves and cannot be limited in any effective or democratic manner. In this scenario, you would table a constitutional amendment to dissolve parliament and establish a separation-of-powers style arrangement with three independent branches of government. The President would be elected in a one-man, one-vote system every five years and the legislature by nationwide ranked voting and instant run-off. A two-term limit would be imposed for both the legislature and the executive, though the judiciary would serve lifetime appointments. It would be a far more contentious system than exists today and gridlock may be a reality for many administrations. But it would also encourage, in the populace, a desire to engage in civic discourse and allow for a far more robust marketplace of ideas, resolving the intellectual rot that plagues our society. Separation of powers would perhaps even allow the oligarchy to be challenged and the formation of a permanent Supermajority would be extremely difficult, especially since the independent judiciary would not be beholden to any segment of society. You may even go so far as to have the legislature be comprised half of elected candidates and half of the citizenry, directly elected in a lottery (provided they meet certain conditions such as being of the age of majority and being literate and numerate; they may even be elected one term in advance and shadow their predecessors so they understand how the government works). I see the conversion to a presidential system as the only way for us to survive the collapse of your party and remain an independent state, though we would lose much of the legislative and executive agility that the Supermajority is famous for. But the Westminster system allows for the overconcentration of power. Our current afflictions — lack of national security, lack of ideas and lack of republican rule — are due to not only your strategic mismanagement but also to the absolute power you have accrued.

There is no joy in these considerations. As I read back what I have written, my mouth is filled with the taste of ashes and dust. It pains me to even consider these eventualities, but you have so thoroughly rotted the state and society that these may be our only options. You may abandon us and cede control to your cherry-picked fourth-generation duds, but when the time comes and we are surrounded by decay and crumbling walls, our safe port no longer able to weather the storm, know that I, and others who care for Singapore and Singaporeans, will do our best to help — you, you have already done enough.

Regards,
Sean Ng

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