It Wasn’t Me

 Leadership Lessons from the Red Dot

I’ve noticed that whenever something is critical about the top three champions of Covid-Mismanagement (Donald Trump of the USA, Narendra Modi of India and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil), there will always be someone who will retort that the macho man brought great prosperity to the nation and is not responsible for the obvious failure of Covid mismanagement. Of the three, Trump was the most vocal. Reporter would say something about the USA having the greatest number of daily infections and instead of talking about what he was even imagine about the situation, he’d say it was all China’s fault. – Yes, we know the virus is supposed to have started in a lab in Wuhan but the point is the pandemics are on your soil and its your job to solve the problem that is screwing up your country.

What’s even more disturbing is when the followers of such impotent leaders proceed to make these excuses for their “leader,” and its particularly disturbing when the said follower making the excuse is someone highly intelligent and in a high-level leadership position. For Americans it was “Trump led us to the best prosperity ever and it’s the fault of the Covid explosion is the fault of the state governors. Trump is not responsible for the mess.” Now that Covid Central has moved to India, you hear the things that were once said about Trump being said about Modi. The only thing one is tempted to say to these people is “What is the point of having a President or Prime Minster if all they’re going to do is to outsource national problems but take credit when things are going well?”

It’s not like places like America and India don’t know what leadership looks like. India invented non-violent protest under Gandhi and kicked out the British without firing shots. America had Abraham Lincoln, the Roosevelt cousins and there was Harry Truman who succeeded Franklin Roosevelt just before the end of the Second World War. Truman famously kept a sign “The Buck Stops Here” on his desk.

 

How did leadership go from this to?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOcY3XlzPzs

 

This?

As a Singaporean, it pains me to say that, the painful decline in leadership standards in the significant powers could have started here in little Singapore. Our Prime Minister might have set a horrible example for future leaders beyond Singapore’s shores. Narendra Modi is known for his admiration of Lee Kuan Yew and was one of the main foreign dignitaries at his funeral.

Ever since Lee Kuan Yew stepped aside in 1990, he created a lucrative side-gig as a consultant, going round the world telling people how to run their countries. Given that that the late Mr. Lee had left Singapore in a very prosperous state, leaders of developing nations thought it was worth imitating Mr. Lee.

Unfortunately, while Mr. Lee’s model had its moments, there were flaws, namely the fact that Mr. Lee started creating a culture of elitism or a culture where the top genuinely believed that it was entitled to be there and therefore entitled to claim all the glory and outsource the problems.

For me, nothing illustrated this as clearly as the 2007 escape of Mas Selamat, our “Osama-type” terrorist. How did the government react to an “Osama-Type” terrorist waltzing out of a highly-secured facility? Well, Wong Kan Seng, the Minister of Home Affairs proceeded grin like an ape for the cameras and apologized that “This had to happen.”

 

How not to react when an “Osama-Like” terrorist waltzes out of a Highly Secured Facility

The grand result of an inquiry that revealed massive incompetence in the Ministry of Home Affairs was the fact that two Gurkhas got deported but both the Minister of Home Affairs and the Head of the Internal Security kept their jobs.

The two great highlights of the whole incident came from our most famous export on management – Lee Kuan Yew, who proceeded to berate the electorate for being complacent (yes, its our fault that we expect you to do the job that we pay you for) and funnily enough from our Prime Minister, who was very present in the moment of winning the hosting of the inaugural Youth Olympics but notably absent when the news of Mr. Salamat’s leisure stroll broke out. Our Prime Minister proved that he could, when pushed to, be an exceedingly good and impassioned orator. Was he making a case of national unity and trying to gather the nation together to catch an evil terrorist? His passion oratory started to flower in the defense of a minister who had failed a “moment of truth” test.

He was there to celebrate our moment of global triumph. Where did he go to when a terrorist went for a stroll from highly secured facility? 

How did the Prime Minister get so impassioned about this particular minister who failed so spectacularly at the moment of truth? We, the general public, thought the minister should have been sacked as can be seen from this clip of reaction to his nomination.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX48D2KsIHA

 

Things seemed to get better for Singapore after 2007 and it seems that everybody took the “leadership lessons” from Singapore to heart. Follow Singapore’s example – grab the glory and keep telling people that you are the direct cause of prosperity. However, whenever a problem arises, always find someone else to blame, especially if it’s the people who are paying you to solve problems.

Apparently, this is how nations are supposed to leap frog into prosperity. Unfortunately for Americans, Indians and Brazilians, this model of Singapore leadership has been taken quite literally and executed (forgive the pun) on a massive scale.