Lazy Lah

 

I know I shouldn’t indulge in stereotypes but I was considered an odd ball when I was growing up as an Asian kid in the Western world. The reasons were simple, my strengths were in the use of language rather than in numbers and I preferred going out with people rather than studying. Asian students were always assumed to be quiet, less social but always hardworking. The Americans describe their Asian communities as being the “model minority.” The kids are always at school and the parent are always at work.

Singapore’s first non-Caucasian colonial administrator, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, made the most of that stereotype when seeking foreign investment from the Western world. He was the cheerleader of “Asian Values,” which a phrase he used to say that anyone setting up shop in Singapore would find a population of authority-respecting (the boss is God on earth) and hardworking people (happy to work whatever hours you set).

Once again, there is some truth of that. Singapore’s school kids have to slog it out in one of the world’s more demanding education systems. Our old folks who carry the heaviest loads in fast-food outlets are probably amongst the hardest working people around.

However, as with everything related to the public image of Singapore, that’s not quite accurate. Whilst our old folks are among the more hardworking people around, they are also among the least rewarded. Our system does not exactly encourage hard work. In fact, if you look our system, we actually encourage the opposite of hard work. If you look at what our Prime Minister calls “Natural Aristocracy,” you will notice that sloth, particularly intellectual sloth is a prerequisite of being part of the elite.

Take the example of the regular debate on 377A, the section of the penal code that criminalises consensual sex among adult men. Evidence that this is a useless law that does not do anything for society is overwhelming. However, not a single one of our highly educated representatives have bothered to point out the obvious? Why is that?

The answer is simple. The biggest proponent of keeping this law, is a legal professor who has spent a good portion of her life arguing that the removing the law will effectively make the increase the number of homosexuals. How does our natural aristocracy respond to this scientifically challenged claim? One elected representative I used to work alongside in his day job, commented that the professor just used a lot of big words. In hind sight this particular member of parliament was effectively saying that was too much hard work trying to understand big words and therefore too trying to understand if the message made sense.  

Another example of how sloth is celebrated by our natural aristocracy comes from another former nominated member of parliament, Mr. Calvin Cheng. Mr. Cheng is everything that I am not. He is brainy (Oxford University), he is rich and more importantly he has hair. Because he has the things that I don’t have, he gets to indulge in intellectual laziness. Take his celebration of the announcement that the Yale-NUS college would be shutting down, which he pasted on his Facebook page.

 

His only explanation was that the Yale-NUS college was a bastion of evil American liberalism and his only evidence was the fact that there was a professor who happens to be a leading light among opposition voices thought that Singapore didn’t need an American college as a partner.

 

 

Perhaps you could argue that I’m just being jealous because Mr. Cheng has hair. However, it seems to be that this is one of the biggest examples of celebrating intellectual sloth. Sure, Singapore can build a college of its own to suite its own cultural context. However, that would take time and effort that no one is prepared to invest. Yale on the other hand has a “brand” (merely ranks among the best in the world) and what could be the easiest way for our National University of Singapore (NUS) to put itself on the world map than to tie up with Yale. Then, when things don’t go as planned, close everything down and call it a bastion of values that incompatible with the rest of society.

What else can you call this other than laziness? You don’t want to invest the time in building something on your own. Then, you decide to tie up with a foreign institution but don’t want to put in the time and effort to either see if there is cultural compatibility with the institutions or in trying to create said cultural compatibility. You merely close it down after millions of dollars spent without even including the person that you hired to make things happen in the discussion process.

Mr. Cheng is a cheerleader of laziness. He’ll take a position and come up with a banal argument that fails to scratch the surface of the issue and expects to be treated as an intelligent person (which he actually is and there are times when he actually makes sense). Take his posting on the super majority of the ruling party, which can be found at:

https://calvincheng.sg/2020/07/supermajority/

The crux of his argument seems to be, if the ruling party isn’t going to have supermajority to change the constitution at will, the opposition can’t have one either. Besides, nobody cares so why bother. Let me repeat that this is coming from someone who graduated from Oxford (one of the world’s best) and not the ranting of senile person.

Mr. Cheng is unfortunately not the only member of the natural aristocracy who takes pride in being lazy. He’s merely the most vocal in his celebration of laziness. Read through his rantings and you get a good of idea of why someone of our larger home-grown corporations have performed so underwhelmingly. The man on top comes up with an idea and expects people who worship the idea because it is his. Any challenge to the said idea is considered heresy and incompatible with local culture. When things go wrong, its everyone else’s fault and when a paltry solution to the surface problem is discovered, the man on top is a hero. Why are people surprised that nobody goes out of their way to build better things in such management cultures?

I’ve argued that the problem is not that Singapore imports people from elsewhere. The problem here is that our people have been discouraged from the doing the hard work of actually thinking and people who try to think are slapped down as being Western liberals. As such, local talent leaves and goes elsewhere and we waste talent.

Let’s remember why the teaching of liberal arts was discouraged in the first place. To do well in the liberal arts, one is required to challenge established ideas and liberal arts students spend their time debating all sorts of things. The liberal arts don’t qualify you for anything in particular but they train you to think of issues from a variety of angles. If you look at Mr. Cheng’s celebration of the closure of Yale-NUS, it would seem that training people to think is incompatible with Singapore culture. If Mr. Cheng and his fellow members of the natural aristocracy want Singapore to succeed, they should not celebrate this and do their best to make thinking part of the local culture.

It’s Not that We’re No Good – We Just Don’t Meet Their Criteria of Being Good.

 I had an early morning breakfast with a friend of mine, who had left the security of a career in the SAF to become an entrepreneur. During this meeting, he mentioned that he felt that the problem in Singapore wasn’t so much the lack of talent but the fact that many people were simply ignored because they didn’t meet the official criteria of talent or were talented but unrecognized as such because they didn’t fit into the system.

This conversation got me thinking about our rather complex relationship with the word talent. Singapore claims that it built its great economic miracle by making the most of its “human resources.” At the same time, the government consistently tells us that we need to be open to “foreign talent,” if we are to continue to be prosperous and that Singapore has to “import” talent because we simply don’t have the domestic talent to drive the economy of the future.

I personally don’t have anything against the “importation of talent.” An important part of my life story is based on the fact that my mother married an American expat, who brought me around the world. If I look at back at my “career highlights,” I’m blessed because of the Indian expat community. I would have starved a long time ago if it wasn’t got the “expat” community.

Having said that, I question if Singapore really lacks talent and if we do, why do we lack talent? Our education system is often blamed for this in as much as while our system produces “educated” workers, we don’t produce “leaders” in anything. To be fair, our universities are trying to change and have been running programs aimed at fostering a more “entrepreneurial” culture.

However, whilst our universities are trying to get things moving, I’m inclined to agree with my friend. There are talented Singaporeans who were somehow squished out and were only able to achieve things outside of Singapore. Then, once they achieved outside of Singapore, they were either made to feel so unwelcome because had to break a rule to leave to pursue their talents or they are held up as examples of glorious government guidance (which is more often than not – untrue) to an extent that they end up loosing the edge that made them great in the first place. Think of Kevin Kwan of Crazy Rich Asians fame in the first group and Sim Wong Hoo and Joseph Schooling in the second group.

Let’s look at the recently concluded Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics as an example. Let’s be honest, the Olympics were a disappointment and our “golden” boy didn’t even come close to being able to defend his title. By contrast, our Paralympics team did very well. We managed to get a gold medal thanks to Ms. Yip Pin Xiu. This wasn’t the first gold medal for Ms. Yip. She had claimed the gold in the 2012 Rio Games and in the 2008 Beijing Games. If you look at success at the international level over a period of time as a yard stick, Ms. Yip is probably the most successful athlete that Singapore has ever produced.

 

Let’s Applaud the fact that a girl in a wheelchair is probably our most successful athlete.

Yet, despite her success at three of the largest tournaments for disabled athletes, Ms. Yip remains a relative unknown in Singapore. It’s only in this Paralympic Games where politicians have mentioned Ms. Yip, which is contrasted with the way everyone rushed to have their photos taken with Mr. Schooling after the Rio Games. Why is that so? Could it be because Ms. Yip is “disabled” and therefore not looked upon in the same way as her more “abled” counterparts?

Let’s look things this way. Singapore has far more successful at the Paralympics than in the Olympics. Every medal winner in the Paralympics has been a “home-grown” talent. There’s been a need to “import” talent for the Paralympics in the same way there has been for the Olympics.

 

Medal Count for the Olympics – Taken from Wikipedia

 

Medal Count for the Paralympics – Taken from Wikipedia.

 

Who Won Our Olympic Medals? – Taken from Wikipedia

 

Who Won Our Paralympic Medals – Taken from Wikipedia.

Whilst our Paralympic athletes have been more successful than our Olympic ones, nobody talks about the Paralympic ones. You could argue that this isn’t limited to Singapore in as much as the world focuses on the Olympics rather than the Paralympics.

However, we have to question why we aren’t doing more to support disabled athletes. Why, for example do we think we need to award an Olympic Gold Medalist S$1,000,000 but value to the Gold of a Paralympian at only S$400,000. Sure, TV ratings may be greater for the Olympics but hey, let’s look at what we’ve gained there and what we do gain in the Paralympics. Why does Singapore focus so much on “able-bodied” athletes when it’s our disabled one who give us the real glory. Shouldn’t Singapore be focusing on its strengths and hey, becoming a “hub” for disabled sports would really put us on a map. Let’s be the guys who support those who go through greater challenges (Yes, Mr. Schooling’s story is amazing, when you think of the sacrifice his parents made so he could follow his dreams and develop his talents. However, Ms. Yip’s story is equally if not more amazing in that it’s miracle that a girl in a wheelchair can be a world class swimmer.)

This “wrong” focus is not just limited to athletics. I recently got involved in a discussion with a former BBC reporter who posted something about how she was not hired when she moved back to Singapore because MediaCorp felt that viewers did not like “dark skinned” presenters. It goes without saying that MediaCorp have denied it, saying that they hire purely based on merit. Her comments can be found below:

 

Leaving aside the merits of her claim, what is obvious is that it became very clear that MediaCorp had missed out on hiring some talented home-grown presenters. I noticed this back in 2013, when I had to arrange interviews for Raghuram Rajan, who was then Chief Economic Adviser to the Indian Government. Both BBC and Bloomberg chased me for the interview and it was a local born Sikh girl who interviewed him from the BBC and a local Malay girl who interviewed him for Bloomberg. Our local press felt it was beneath them to interview this highly acclaimed and internationally recognised economist on a Sunday because …. Their bureaus were shut. Luckily for the local news, I managed to speak to an Australian who then sent a lovely American girl down to interview him.

It’s sad. We throw money at certain groups of people we consider to be good. We thrown money to get people from elsewhere. Yet we ignore some of our own people who don’t fit into our “idea” and “preconceived” notion of what is good. Sometimes it’s a boon for these people in that they end up at better places and go onto better things. However, it us a tragedy that we’re searching all over the world for people to suit our criteria of good when the talents were right under our noses.

Be Like a Paralymian and Don’t Bubble Wrap Yourself

 Heng Swee Kiat, our Once-and-Never Prime Minister hit the nail on the head when he announced that it was not possible to “Bubble Wrap” the Singapore Worker from foreign competition. Mr. Heng made those comments at the National University’s 115^th anniversary. A full report on Mr. Heng’s remarks can be found at:

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/not-possible-to-bubble-wrap-singapore-workers-from-foreign-competition-heng

However, whilst he may have been correct in his comments, Mr. Heng was focused on the wrong target. Singaporean workers have been facing foreign competition for at least 10-years. Instead, he should have focused his energies on Singaporean businesses, particularly the ones owned or controlled (usually both) by the government. These names consist of the biggest names in Singapore’s economy and along with the “foreign investors,” have carved out a name for themselves in the building of Singapore Inc.

These businesses have become part of the landscape of the prosperous Singapore that the foreign investor community sees. However, in recent years, they’ve come to symbolize the problems that any future Singapore faces. As one of the leading observers on Singapore’s banking industry, Mr. Emanuel Daniel says:

https://www.emmanueldaniel.com/singaporeans-dont-deserve-piyush-gupta/

 

Mr. Daniel is by not a political liberal in any sense of the word and his comments on the performance of our large home-grown industries need to be examined. If Mr. Daniel is correct in his assessment on our large home-grown companies, it is a sign that the economic model that worked so well in the past is now floundering and if not restructured, will collapse.

Where do we start? Perhaps the best place, as with most developed economies, would be in stock exchange. In most places, the companies that make up the stock exchange index are the biggest and most prominent ones listed on that particular exchange. One can get a picture of what industries drive the national economy. So, in the case of Singapore, who are the guys who drive the economy. A list of the companies that make up the Straits Times Industrial Index (STI) can be found at:

https://www.sgx.com/indices/products/sti

The main point that comes to mind upon an initial glance of the companies that make up the STI index is the fact that of the 28 off companies that make up the index, roughly one third of them are glorified landlords. The rest is made up of the local banks, a few hard-industry players, a few retailers and the national airline.

On an individual level there is nothing wrong with being a landlord. It makes sense to own a property in land scarce Singapore, because if you look at the investment logic, it makes sense. Singapore is land scarce, so as the population increases in a limited space, logic has it that property prices will increase.

However, it’s a different story on a national level. The fact that landlords control such a high portion of the national wealth, indicates that most of nation’s money is doing nothing more than waiting for plots of land to appreciate rather than in the value-creating stuff (even commercial landlords need tenants with business in order to pay rents). With the exception of suing tenants who cannot pay, maintaining the property and tearing it down and building something new every two decades or so, landlords do not generate much activity that contributes to economic growth.

The second point to note, as Mr. Daniel alluded to in his blog piece is that the CEO of our major home-grown companies are more often than not, former civil servants or more specifically, military men. The official line has been that these civil servants are the best and brightest that the nation has to offer. These men (usually are) all scored impeccable academic results and were sent to the world’s best universities at the tax payer’s expense. The government calls sending these men into the private sector an act of “sharing talent.”

Only problem is that our scholars are “bubble wrapped” from any form of competition (foreign or otherwise) from the moment they leave university. For example, a Ministry of Education Scholar will only teach in a school of kids who are bright enough to succeed whatever you do. Once they go into business, it’s always in a monopoly like business.

How exactly does bubble wrapping help the national economy? How does it make Singapore a richer and better place? Well, if you look at a random selection of the companies that make up the STI index, Singapore is helped by losing share value. Take a look at the price history of some of our more prominent home-grown companies:

 

SingTel

 

SembCorp Industries

 

SembCorp Marine

 

 

Keppel Corporation

While the share price may not be indicative of everything related to the company’s underlying value, the fact that these companies have been managing a decline in share price over a five-year period is not a good sign. It gets even worse if you consider the fact that, stock markets around the world have been doing exceptionally well.

Bubble wrapping has not been good for our bosses. In the case of the companies mentioned, they managed decline of the share price in the last five years is considered relatively good if you consider the fact that there was less bubble wrap in these companies than in some other areas. SingTel, for example, may be bubble wrapped in Singapore (main growth coming from selling phone cards to maids) but it has had under previous management bought units in places where there was no bubble wrapping (think Optus in Australia and Bharti AirTel in India). These units have ensured that the business in Singapore sees increasing revenue.

A managed decline is relatively good when compared to the need to sell out. There was the example of the SMRT corporation, where a former CEO who was a former Chief of Defense Force became a hero to his shareholders by selling the company to the major shareholder. Then, there’s my favourite and often used example of Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) and MediaCorp, which lost money when they went into new businesses, cried to the government that the market was too small for competition, enjoyed a honey moon of remonopolisaiton sniping at each other and then were pushed into obscurity because people decided that they could get their news from elsewhere and the CEO of a Media company ended up becoming the butt of jokes because he took “umbrage” that he was asked a question that he was actually prepared for (SPH is listed and stock exchange rules require executives be prepared for all likely questions before they face the press).

To be fair to the Singapore government, it has got many things right. However, the efforts to bubble wrap bosses and monopoly businesses isn’t one of them. Singaporeans should never expect to be like the bosses of these old monopolistic companies. Instead, they should be more like Ms. Yip Pin Xiu, a Paralympian who has won four gold medals in three Paralympic games (2008 Beijing, 2016 Rio and 2020 Tokyo). Ms. Yip is not bubble wrapped. She goes out of her way to face the world’s best on the international stage. Her consistency is better than her more “able-bodied” counterparts, having seen to it that our flag was raised more than once. Bubble wrapping is bad and our sectors of our economy need to get out of the bubble wrap and the government should get them to behave more like Ms. Yip.

How Could he Break Up with Me – I’m So Pretty

 

A lady friend of mine recently broke up with a boyfriend and was heartbroken. She kept saying, “I’m so pretty, how could he break up with me.” After a while, she confessed that her behavior towards him wasn’t exactly angelic and I didn’t know how to tell her that being pretty was only good for attracting the guy (heaven knows how many times I’ve screwed myself over a pretty face or a sexy body) but it required something else to keep the relationship going.

I bring this up because I work in an industry which is effectively the laundromat of businesses gone wrong. The story is not uncommon. People are presented with something that looks really good or the presenter is someone that they trust implicitly. They are duly impressed, put in their money and before long they end up fighting for bits of paper that has long diminished in value. I think of a trial in a trade mark dispute over a bar in Bali, where a group of high-powered English and Australian businessmen kept telling the court, “But we were mates.” When you run into enough of these incidents, you end up wanting to bash the buy over the head and yell “Dude – you’re a high-powered person – how did you fall for this.”

In all fairness, the saying that “first impressions count,” is exceedingly true. How we judge people often depends on our initial meeting and unfortunately, humans (particularly men) are visual creatures. We mistake what looks good for actually being good. I think of the wise words of my Uncle Jeffrey who once hired me. He was particular about how his employees dressed. His reasoning was simple – “Cosmetics count.”

This is something that the conmen of the world are all very aware off. One only has to look back at the movie “Catch Me if You Can,” staring Leonardo DiCaprio.  One of the key scenes in that movie comes from a piece of advice that a young Frank Abagnale receives from his father (played by Christopher Walken) as to why the New York Yankees always win:

 

Like it or not – looking good is big part of the game.

We need to remember that the term “con” comes from “confidence” and conmen used to be known as “confidence tricksters.” If you want to run a successful scam involves gaining the confidence of the people you are going to scam.

As such, people running scams do their best to ensure that first impressions are all powerful. The entire high end fashion industry depends on the image that it creates in the minds of people. Who doesn’t notice the Rolex watch or the Armani jackets? Think of who buys high end cars and property? When you know that a person drives a Mercedes, the instant impression is that that person must be doing well – how else could they afford the Mercedes.

Think of a former US President who went through great efforts to stress that he was a billionaire. He saw to it that we saw his private jets and swanky apartments. It created an image that everyone believed in. When he said “drain the swamp,” everyone clapped and said that he was a politician who couldn’t be bought because – well he had shown us that he had all the money in the world. The fact that he using contributions from his campaign donners to pay off personal liabilities was another story that got ignored.

In order to stay safe from being scammed, one does need to do something called due diligence. It’s easy to believe someone is successful when you notice that they drive a Mercedes and seem to be very generous in all the places that one should be seen in. Few people will bother checking if the Mercedes is being financed by say, resistance to paying manual labourers who do work for them. 

Being a good con is, however, is more than just about being pretty. There’s also the ability to get the right reference. A former head hunter once explained that the key was getting into one bank and staying there for a reasonable amount of time. After that, getting the next job would become considerably easier because the other banks would assume that if you made it past the first one, you’d have to be a good chap. One only has to think of how the legal fraternity got scammed in EnvyTrading. How did Mr. Ng scam the great and mighty? It was most likely that hescammed one and that one proceeded to sell his scam for him.

Most people tend to be cautious in the initial interactions ie, “let’s try it out until we get to know each other,” type of mentality. As such, the best crooks usually do what the ordinary ones don’t. They invest in time. They build up genuine reputations for being reliable and then they pull the plug. Most people don’t really care about how or what you as long as their getting paid. I think of the dealer in high end goods who invested years in building up a reputation as a solid paymaster until one day he claimed he couldn’t pay because his customers had gone under. Reputation as someone from Kroll once said, “Is a nebulous thing.”

It’s always nice to see the best in people. It’s easy to fall for things that look pretty. However, we always need to have that element of skepticism in all our dealings, even with our nearest and dearest.

The Big Red Dot with a Small Man Complex

It’s a little unsporting of me to throw sand on the delayed national day parade but Singapore or at least the government of Singapore has a strange relationship with the concept of size. On one hand we’re very proud of being small. The original insult of “Red Dot” has something of a badge of pride. We like to talk a lot about being a little red dot that has managed to do big things.

However, whilst we like to trumpet the fact that we’re a red dot that does big things, we’re told by the very people who tell talk about being a red dot that does big things, that Singapore is too small a place for the locals to ever achieve much. I remember watching some of Lee Kuan Yew’s interviews before his death in 2015, where he made a point that Singapore didn’t have the economies of scale to build things and therefore the best that Singaporeans could ever be was to be part of a big company from a big country and if they couldn’t make it into a big company from elsewhere, they could play a role in making that happen for others by being part of biggest block of them all – the government.

In fairness to Mr. Lee, his ideas worked brilliantly. Multinational investments brought in by a competent government helped propel Singapore into the leagues of wealthy nations. However, there was one key side effect. Whilst Singapore was projecting itself as a poster child for free-market economics, we were in reality a poster child for state guided capitalism – so much so that Mr. Lee would proudly tell the world how Deng Xiaping had paid him a visit and told him that he wished that all he had to manage was Shanghai. Mr. Lee turned Singapore into an industrial park were he and his gang would happily allocate our much-trumpeted human resources to the “multinational” investor.

The problem with this strategy was the fact that it was successful. Singapore was the odd ball that made strong central control and central planning a success. The contrast between Singapore and former communist countries could not be starker. Countries that were once communist worked hard to break up central controls and dare I say break up monopolies. Singapore, by contrast, found itself addicted to central control and the monopolization of certain industries. I think of the “re-monopolisation” of the media in 2004 as the prime example of our addiction to monopolies. Both Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) and MediaCorp couldn’t tolerate losses in their “new units,” and so they cried to the government that Singapore was too small a market to have competition and the government promptly obliged them. Both Alan Chan, the then CEO of SPH and Ernest Wong, the then CEO of MediaCorp patted themselves on the back for saving their respective companies from the “foreign” concept of competition.

To an extent in worked. SPH and MediaCorp went back to snipping at each other about prominent issues like whether viewership or readership was more valuable. Both of them failed to realise that whilst they had found a way to protect their “god-given” monopoly profits, they would end up facing competition from a place that they never took seriously – the internet and small news sites which could get round the rigid laws that the Singapore government had put in place to protect the monopoly players. The print version of Straits Times, which had been a money spinner or the only place that advertisers placed their dollars, no longer became the staple source of news for many people and the advertisers reacted accordingly.

Our “Big” companies ran in a similar fashion to conventional militaries. The saying “God is on the side of big battalions” was paraphrased into “God is on the side with the most money and best lobbying power.” Our government, which happened to be a major shareholder in the big companies, saw to it that God would always be on the side of big companies.

Take the example of our banking sector, which is officially very strong. Banks like DBS and OCBC have won all sorts of praise from trade publications for being financially strong. However, as one of the industry’s most prominent observers, Emanuel Daniel, notes – that’s because they’ve been protected by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) from disruptive competition. Mr. Daniel makes the point that “Fintech” companies can only serve customers with bank accounts, which makes the Fintech companies contractors of the banks rather than competitors. This is not the case in other parts of our region, where FinTechs have been allowed to compete directly with banks. Mr. Daniel’s blog entry can be found at:

https://www.emmanueldaniel.com/why-dbs-is-not-the-worlds-best-bank/

Our regulators remained trapped in the same mindset as, dare I say, our military planners. We are as a group unable to look beyond wars as being anything other than a series of battles, where the side with the greater fire power inevitably wins.

It will be without saying that the lesson that our planners learn from the recent take over of Afghanistan is that the centre needs to take greater control. People operating in the field, whether its in a military, security or economic front, will be brought under the control of the centre.

This would be a mistake. Say what you like about terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but they have a very effective structure for getting things done with very little resources. As vile as what they do may be, they have somehow found highly motivated and dare I say intelligent people who have managed to execute things with great effect.

Let’s take a look at the Taliban and their recent take over. The Americans tried to build Afghanistan on a system of control from the centre in Kabul, whilst ignoring tribal alliances. Money and other resources were poured into the centre, and somehow those resources were not shared with the tribal lands. This was precisely where the Taliban made their inroads. They worked the ground rather than waited for instructions from some imaginary centre. The results speak for themselves.

 

World’s Most Powerful Military made to run away by bearded men in caves – Copyright AP.

The world has changed. Singaporeans, looking to build a future for themselves, cannot rely on big blocks with lots of cash from the multinationals or the government. Instead, they need to work as small decentralized units, coming together to form consortiums when they need to and acting as small units when they do not need to work together. Whilst God has shown to be on the side of big battalions or big bank accounts in head-to-head confrontations, he also shown that in the long run he favours those who know how to work alliances.

Savvy A***Holes

 As the world watched in shock as the Taliban waltzed back into Presidential Palace in Kabul, the Taliban decided to throw another sucker punch to the rest of the world. They proceeded to do what they would stone people for 20-years ago when they were last in charge – they proceeded to invite the world’s cameras to a press conference.

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

 

The Taliban proceeded to do something that nobody expected to them to do at all. They started speaking words of comfort. The said that the rights of women would be protected within the laws of Islam (though they never specified whose interpretation of Islamic laws would prevail) and that they would not allow Afghanistan to used as a launch pad for attacks against other nations (or as expressed in the Israeli series Fauda – the crazies would be controlled).

The Taliban PR campaign wasn’t limited to the press conference. The Taliban spokesperson went as far as to call up a lady presenter to get himself interviewed by a woman:

https://www.businessinsider.com/taliban-female-afghan-reporter-in-person-tv-interview-project-moderation-2021-8

 

The fact that the Taliban have bothered to address the world media and have said all the “right” things has been as shocking as the ease of their military victory. While the Taliban were out saying all the right things to the international press, the American President and British Prime Minister were left looking rather clumsy and this televised exchange in the House of Commons indicates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sidjLMc3_c8

 

As shown by the pictures of Afghans trying to flee the country, it would appear that a good portion of the Afghani population aren’t buying into the “nice” words. The experiences of the last period of Taliban rule have given enough people to distrust the Taliban. There are signs such as the violence used against protestors, that indicate that the new image that the Taliban are trying to project is just that – an image.

You don't run away from people known for being nice

However, it’s still worth asking the question as to why a group that used to revel in their brand image of being the worst kind of religious zealots, even bothering to try and appear nice?

One answer could be that the group has learnt the power of public and international opinion. When they first took over, in the 1996, the only countries that recognised the Taliban government were Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. While countries around the world are more cautious about giving recognition to any Taliban government, there are potential scalps such as China (Second largest economy in the world and with a large and growing military), which has stated that it would be ready for “friendly and cooperative ties” with the Taliban:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_uN6809IL4

 

If the Taliban have realized anything, it is the fact that regimes that are recognised by the rest of the world have a higher chance of survival. Furthermore, diplomatic recognition from the "alternative" superpowers, specifically China or Russia would be, as the example of North Korea has show, a very good insurance policy.

Countries with good reputations also have an easier task in dealing with internal dissent and countries with a “moderate” image, generally speaking, have less issues with their neighbours. Being tarred with the same brush as Osama Bin Ladin and the gang at Al-Qaeda costs them the support from the only three countries that recognised them. 

Sure, good PR is only going to get so far and nice words in a press conference will only get one so far unless there’s some actions on the ground back up the words spoken (only countries with a hold on certain things can get away with a PR disconnect).

However, it should say something to the Western world and her allies that the Taliban are getting the value of PR. The USA had a president who called the press “Enemy of the People.” Reporters without borders have talked about the UK government giving “Vindictive” reactions to negative reporting on Covid.

If the big brand Western nations could snap at the press, Singapore went one further. We came up with a POFOMA law, which effectively gave any minister the power to decide what was fake news or not (so, woe betide anyone who wrote something a minister might not like on the day a random minister had a woke up on the wrong side of the bed.)

Open communication works. It should be a frightening sign when a group best known for brutal behavior understands that at a time when advanced nations seem to be forgetting about it.

Winning a Battle isn’t the Same as Winning a War

 

Back in last year’s American Presidential Election, Donald Trump famously predicted that the media would stop talking about “COVID-COVID” after the election. Unfortunately for the world, he has finally been proven right. His successor somehow managed to come up with a successful vaccination roll out program that seems to have tamed Covid outbreaks in the USA (which still remains the world leader in Covid infections).

While it was a good move to rush out the vaccine, it was not a good move to rush the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, which America had entered back in 2001 in an effort to catch Osama Bin Ladin and his Al Qaeda gang in revenge for destroying the Twin Towers in New York. The only party which benefited from the move was the Taliban, the religious fundamentalist who ran Afghanistan prior to the American invasion in October 2001 and who had become a by word for stone age treatment of people who didn’t agree with them (This being the group that famously bombed ancient Buddhist statues, banned music and refused to let girls go to school). It took a matter of weeks for the Taliban to recapture the entire nation without much resistance. President Biden’s claim of “America is back,” got a sharp kick in the nuts with pictures of American troops rushing out in helicopters in the same way that American troops had to flee from the top of their embassy in Saigon in 1975.

While Joe Biden will get slapped for the decision to pull the troops out suddenly, the problem was actually started back in 2001, when George W Bush made the decision to invade in order to punish the perpetrators of the 11 September attacks. Back in 2001, the Taliban had run the parts of the country they controlled in such a brutal manner that when the Northern Alliance gained the military capability to drive them from power thanks to support from American air power, the people were happy to see the backs of the Taliban.

The Americans and their allies in the Afghan government had twenty-years to create the conditions in Afghanistan so that the Taliban would never have been able to make a come-back. If you want to look at it from a brand perspective, the American brand of “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” lost the war to the Taliban brand of “death, ignorance, intolerance and destruction.” The American presence in Afghanistan will probably go down as one of the biggest waste of money and life in history – an audit of what the effort costs can be found in the following report by Al-Jazeera:

 https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/8/16/the-us-spent-2-trillion-in-afghanistan-and-for-what

How did the world’s biggest military and economic power end up being humiliated by a rag tag group of religious zealots? Better informed people have given their opinions on how the superpower failed to build a nation. The links can be found at:

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/8/17/the-collapse-of-afghan-military-we-have-seen-this-movie-before;

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/8/16/the-us-the-taliban-and-the-stunning-defeat-in;

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/8/17/why-did-the-afghan-army-disintegrate-so-quickly ; and

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/8/16/what-went-wrong-in-afghanistan

Perhaps the arguments made by these writers can be summed up the military saying that the politicians running the superpower forgot there’s a difference between a battle and a war. One of my former army officers, who was a West Point Graduate made the point that “Americans Always Win the Battle but Never the War.” What’s the difference?

In lay man terms, the battle is a head-to-head confrontation between two opposing forces. As mentioned, in a previous posting, this is usually the fight won by the bigger and more powerful force.

I would sum up a war as a case of ensuring that a given enemy is placed in a situation where they will never entertain the idea of messing with you again.

A single war can have many battles. Both sides will win a certain number of battles. However, the war is only lost when one side capitulates. In World War II the Germans and Japanese won many battles but lost the war. The allied powers rebuilt both Germany and Japan to an extent where nobody considers either a force of disruption. Winning wars is not just about military victories. One of the reasons why Germany and Japan lost was due to an inability to control the supply chain and both nations ran out of resources to wage war. As much as my British friends will object, the war was pretty much won by American money and Russian blood.

In the Korean War, America and her allies won most of the battles. However, technically speaking North Korea never surrendered and nobody gained any territory or advantage other than to agreement that neither Korea should invade the other. In Vietnam, superior American fire power saw US dominance on the battle field but the world remembered American troops fleeing from the top of their embassy.

Wars are inevitably psychological. In Vietnam the US won on the battle field but lost the psychologically.  The lessons from Vietnam were not lost on insurgent groups. Nobody beats the giant elephant when it charges. However, small insects can wear down an elephant on a daily basis over several years. The invasion of Iraq was a classic example. It took a matter of weeks for Saddam’s army to collapse. Years later, the Americans ran away and we got ISIS.

Battles are short and sweet. Wars are long and brutish. Take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example. One side wins all battles because it is the vastly superior force. The other tries to bog them down in a psychological conflict and to waste lives and money to achieve an objective.

If you watch the Israeli series “Fauda,” you’ll notice that this is a long-drawn-out conflict. It’s not about Israeli fire power alone but also about how it turns Palestinians against each other with a combination of strategic brutality and kindness. Israel has special agents who speak fluent Arabic and pass off as Palestinians to the extent that they are perfectly at home praying in mosque and living as Palestinians.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vpZYPsfQ9A

 

This isn’t lost on the Palestinians. In the second season of Fauda, you have an ISIS leader posing as Israeli and telling his men “Speak Hebrew – we are now inside Israel.”

Big powers inevitably get tripped up by the fact that they are big powers and unlikely to be challenged on the battle field. Small powers have to fight very differently in order to make it through the war. In military terms, nobody challenges the USA on the battlefield (As stated in the Newsroom – we spend more on defense than the next 26-nations combined, 25 of whom are allies). However, America has lost wars because it got worn down by enemies who studied them. I think of the scene in Fauda, where the Israelis compliment a Hamas collaborator on his fluent Hebrew, to which the collaborator says, “Got to know your enemy.”

What is true in the military context is also true in other areas. In Singapore politics, we have our ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), which controls all the levers of power. Singapore has never experienced rule by another political party and it’s reached a stage where the political party has used a line from the national anthem as a slogan (Majullah PAP as opposed to Majullah Singapura). This is an unstoppable force on the proverbial battlefield. You have a few opposition parties that rush into the fry and challenge the most powerful beast into battles where they’ll do more than score a few popular points like the debate on CECA (treaty with India).

There is, however, a party that is playing to win a war. This is the Worker’s Party, which remains quiet on many hot button issues. Why is that so? The answer is simple, they understand that in the war, the only thing that matters is seats in parliament. Hence, they focus resources on ensuring they win seats and get the candidates that can win votes. Efforts are focused on showing voters than they can be trusted to look after them rather than on scoring points in cyberspace. The results have been telling. They took a single seat and held onto it for two decades, quietly building up a team and waiting for the ruling party to slip. They took a GRC and the scalp of a respected minister in 2011 and held onto it in 2015. In 2020, they saw to it that their candidates were likeable enough to frustrate ministers (think of Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan’s expression when he was debating Dr. Jamus Lim). They took their second GRC and the scalp of another minister.

In a battle, the bigger force always wins. In a war, it’s the side that has greater resilience and more motivation that wins.

You Can’t Win – Why Fight?

 

Call it a series of coincidences but several things happened that led to this blog post. First it was a WhatsApp conversation with my favourite Young Pork Guzzling Muslim Politician (“YPGMP”) on why people in Myanmar should not have been protesting military rule. Then, over the weekend, India celebrated 75-years of Independence from British Rule. Say what you like about India and Indian nationals but as anyone who has seen the movie Gandhi will tell you, was a hard-fought battle and despite the attempts of being “non-violent,” you had some unforgettably violent moments like the partition between India and Pakistan. Without the struggles of Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru, Lee Kuan Yew and his Gang would have had a much harder fight on their hands. Then, I started binge watching Fauda, an Israeli drama about a unit that infiltrates the Palestinian territories and finally, there was the conquest of Kabul by the Taliban.

All these events got me thinking of one key question. – Why do people fight and protest, particularly when they’re on the side that will most likely lose? As the famous military saying goes “God is on the side of the Big Battalions,” which meant that the bigger force inevitably wins the wars. In a confrontation, the bigger guy inevitably crushes the small guy. Size, as they say matters. Hence, big animals like elephants don’t have predators and combat sports like boxing are inevitably separated into weight categories. The only time in recorded history when a small guy went ahead to take on a giant was when David took on Goliath and he only did so because he had someone bigger in his corner (God).

Nature has shown consistently that the guy with the greater force inevitably wins and the small guy either flees or learns to cooperate with the big guy. Take the basics of Singapore politics. We had Lee Kuan Yew who branded himself as God within Singapore. However, if you read his biography, you’ll notice that the late Mr. Lee’s greatest skill was being an insect that could work with bigger animals. In the early days, he was careful to stay on the good side of the British. Then as the Americans became more prominent, he’d rush to Washington to be the regional consultant to US Presidents. When China started coming up, he ran off to Beijing to become their development consultant. The plan was simple, it was to ensure that all the big animals of the geopolitical jungle had a stake of sorts in keeping Singapore safe and sound.

However, Mr. Lee made one crucial mistake. Whilst he was busy showing the beast of the geopolitical jungle that Singapore was a valuable insect, he also went out of his way to remind his people that they were nothing more than insects that could be crushed should they get  any pesky ideas. Mr. Lee then sold the Singaporean worker to the multinationals as being wonderfully compliant. The selling point was not so much the fact that our workforce was well educated but that it would never go on strike. In his book, Mr. Lee attributes to fall of the British to strikes.

To be fair, Mr. Lee’s initial strategy was successful and made Singapore a wonderfully prosperous place. However, there was one problem. Mr. Lee drilled it into us that all forms of protest and civic participation was bad. If you talk to enough Singaporeans, you’ll notice that they have a chronic inability to understand why people from other parts of the world would ever risk things like protest and confrontation, particularly against a more powerful force. 

The YPGMP brought this home to me when he started telling me about why he felt that his employer’s workers in their Myanmar outlet should not protest:

 

He dismissed it as people getting involved in things that didn’t involve them. I tried to explain that whilst this may be the case in Singapore, it’s not necessarily in the case elsewhere. He argued that it was the protesters against military rule that were ruining the country, as opposed to military rule itself.

 

According to a friend, who is the marketing director of an insurance company in Myanmar, this attitude is common amongst Singaporeans. He told me of a Singaporean who was the CEO of local Myanmar Bank who tried to explain how the killing of the first protestor was justified and how everything would be fine if people stopped protesting.

As far as the late Mr. Lee was concerned, all forms of protest were bad. I take myself as a sad example. I tend to avoid arguments with people like bosses. Answer is simple, what is an argument going to get me. The stress of confrontation is not worth it as long as the money is in my bank account when I expect it to be.

However, that’s because I live and operate in the Singapore context. Losing a source of income will be tough and as long as my various employers don’t get involved in dubious stuff, I’m OK. I take care of my family and myself as long as I have a job. So, what do I really have to fight against? Sure, I have difficult days at work and deal with difficult people but that’s about it.

This isn’t necessarily the case outside of Singapore. It’s definitely not the case in the Gaza strip or in Kabul or in Myanmar.  It’s a case of what is your life worth and an extent, who are you living it for. I worry about making a living and having money to help the kid make her life a little better. However, there are parts of the world where money isn’t the only issue. As much as I might complain about the Singapore government, I don’t worry that some official will one day decide to screw everything up for my kid and her kids. There are, funnily enough, parts of the world where people are screwed for the crime of being born. Parents have the option of trying to flee or trying to change the system even if it costs them their lives.

Singaporeans are lucky in the sense that we are nominally a democracy. Hence, we can get heard every so often. However, what’s to stop a rogue from coming into power and making sure that we live through the same situation that the people in Kabul or the Gaza Strip live in?

Nobody is asking for a revolution and as long as the people are willing to stand up for themselves and communicate with those in power and those in power are willing to listen, we can ensure that the scenes in Yangon don’t happen here. However, if the people are not heard and made powerless, then who is to say when revolutions become a necessity.

Insects when they gather together can make life very uncomfortable for the biggest beast.

 

 

Nasty Insects made the Elephant Flee in Kabul and Saigon – Copyright Al Jazera.

 

Welcome to Loserville – The Place Where the Majority Need to be Protected.

 

Today is Singapore’s National Day. It’s day where we celebrate 56-years of Independence or the day that we got ourselves kicked out of the Malaysian Federation. Our celebration is unique. Unlike other nations, like say, the USA or India, our “Independence Day” is not a celebration of Independence but a celebration of survival. We didn’t fight for our Independence. The rallying cry from our first leaders was “Merdeka Malaysia” rather than “Majullah Singapura,” and the person who gave us Independence was actually Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia’s first Prime Minister, who booted us out of the Malaysian Federation.

Singapore, as is often said in the international press, a wonderful example of how to create everything from nothing. The strategy for doing so was simple. We became a bastion of stability in a turbulent nation and in age where everyone was rejecting “investment” from former colonisers, we welcomed them.

One of the things that made us so attractive to the community of investors was the fact that we were officially governed by laws and we made it clear that unlike other places, we would not be a place that was governed by ethnic or religious concerns. We have found through our collective experience that approaching things “regardless of race or religion,” has been good for our prosperity.

Yet, despite years of enjoying a system of “regardless of race or religion,” there were a few events prior to National Day, which gave a sense that all was not that well with our state of religious harmony. There was, for example, the incident of a racist lecturer who accosted an interracial couple and started haranguing them in public for being – “interracial.” What was disturbing about this incident was the fact that he actually received sympathy in some quarters for losing his job and one commentator on TRemeritus actually questioned how I would feel if all the Chinese girls went for Indian men (the answer being my d*** is not racist and I would have looked for a cute Indian chick).

This experience isn’t totally unique to me. Singapore’s Magically Unconflicted Writer and Enforcer of Laws, Mr. K. Shanmugam was asked by at forum organised by Lianhe Zaobao, our Chinese language daily; “Chinese Singaporeans, the largest group in Singapore, are now asked to be sensitive to the minority. But shouldn't the largest group have the right to decide on Singapore's direction, such as education, language to be used, like other countries?”

 

What makes this question particularly interesting is the fact that it indicates a sense of vulnerability. As the largest ethnic group in Singapore, the Chinese inevitably have the largest influence in deciding the direction of Singapore’s culture.

Take the use of language. Malay is Singapore’s national language. However, for my generation (Gen X), we only use the language for singing the national anthem and army drill commands.  Then, there’s English, which is the official working language of the country. We all grew up learning and using English is everyday life.

That leaves Mandarin and Tamil (the majority of Singapore-born Indians being descended from people from Tamil Nadu). Of the two, Mandarin is considerably more significant in as much as the Chinese are the larger group. However, if you consider the fact that Mandarin is not actually the mother tongue of Singaporeans of Chinese descent (Lee Kuan Yew had an obsession with eradicating Chinese dialects), you’ll find things even more interesting.

Singapore is filled with Tamils who may not necessarily be able to speak Tamil but will speak several Chinese dialects fluently. I think of the conversations I used to have with one of my former father-in-law’s businesses associates. The man spoke better Mandarin than me and if you shut your eyes when speaking to him, you wouldn’t realise he wasn’t Chinese. On the reverse, you’re not going to find a Chinese who speaks Tamil, with the exception of a few curse words (which my Tamil friends from India are quick to assure me are words they would never use because it’s so crass)

Why is that? The answer is simple. The Chinese are in the majority and so there’s no need to learn Tamil. By contrast, the Tamils living in Singapore and to an extent in Malaysia learn Chinese dialects or the language of the streets.

An ethnic majority has an automatic advantage by being the majority. Minorities by default need to adapt to the majority. The situation is not much different elsewhere. Just as Tamils learn Chinese dialects in Singapore, Mexican migrants in the USA are quick to learn English for the simple reason that English is the language of the majority.

Chinese in Singapore are not about to lose their status as the dominant group just as White people in America are not about to be displaced in the immediate future. What is clear though is that the minority populations in both Singapore and USA are growing.

Is this a bad thing?  I don’t think so, or at least I don’t think it should be. Cultures are constantly evolving and I believe that everyone takes a bit of everyone else’s culture and it evolves into something different and unique. If you want the Chinese to be the majority in perpetuity, there is the option of greater migration of people from Mainland China. However, that creates another problem – the differences between Singaporean Chinese and Mainland Chinese are actually greater than between Singaporeans of different races.

As a majority, we need not fear the loss of any advantages in life. We merely need to understand that our fellow citizens of different races and religions also have certain needs and values too and they are deserving of respect as much as we are. “Dark jokes” towards darker skinned people for example, are not funny when repeated often enough, especially when you’re on the receiving end. Minorities by default are the ones adapting and what they’re asking from the majority is merely a bit of sensitivity, which we, as the group in power should provide as a sign of strength.

Mid-Life Crisis

It’s going to be National in a matter of hours and I thought I’d try and bash out something about the country that I’ve called home for the last two decades. Singapore is going to be 56-years old (counting from the day we got booted out of the Malaysian Federation). Although it’s going to be nine-years more before I hit, 56, it is a significant enough milestone both for the nation and people of my generation – Gen X, the generation between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials. We were the first to only sing “Majullah Singapura,” and the last to know Lee Kuan Yew as Prime Ministers.

On the surface of things, Singapore has much to be happy about. We are, when compared to many parts of the world. On the surface, we are relatively prosperous and live within a clean and green city. We have certain luxuries like being able to breath our air, which is a luxury when compared to other parts of the world. Then, as one Englishman once pointed out to me – there is “safety,” which provides us with a freedom that no one else seems to have. As a dad of a young girl, I don’t worry when she goes out late at night.

Covid-19 seems to have made the comparison between Singapore and the rest of the world even greater. Sure, we could have vaccinated more people and the sudden return to “phase 2” was annoying. The explosion of cases in the dormitories last year and the karaoke lounges were undoubtedly failures of policy and enforcement.

However, when all is said and done, we’ve done better than many parts of the world. It’s actually newsworthy when an individual dies of Covid-19 and more importantly, our government and people have allowed the conspiracy nut jobs to take charge of health policy. As an English friend of mine who is now living in the USA says:

 

However, despite a seemingly “good” environment, many of us are feeling angsty. You could say that Singaporeans are going through a collective mid-life crisis. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has friends from elsewhere looking at me like I’m a strange person who complains about life in paradise. However, whilst things may appear to be exceedingly good on the surface (I’m not starving, I have a roof over my head and so on), I, like many Singaporeans, am terrified by the future. Unlike my grandparents, I cannot rely on the constant assurance that the government will ensure the environment I live in will always be conducive to my ability to make a living.

Let’s face it, whilst I have a home that is worth something at the moment, who is to say that it will be worth anything in the next decade or so (I live in an HDB flat). As I get older, my worries increase. It looks increasingly unlikely that I’ll be able to touch my only source of retirement savings (CPF), and costs like healthcare look set to increase. In the meantime, it looks like any employment I can get will be out of the kindness of a few folks.

Whilst the future looks somewhat scary, the system doesn’t seem to be aware of that. Sure, there’s plenty to talk about support for freelance workers and there’s plenty of chatter about fostering innovation and creative enterprises. There’s enough action in these areas to create a few impressive headlines.

However, the truth is, we’re still pretty much a “rentier” economy that’s stuck in a business plan that was designed in the 1960s. One only has to look at the way in which the government rushed to bail out the dormitories that were housing foreign workers from elsewhere. Why did a famously “no-welfare” government rush to bail out an industry that had profited from not doing anything particularly valuable. The reason was simple – a good portion of our economy remains reliant on “muscle” labour. How was it such that the world’s strictest and most efficient government not see that the “pivot” to food and beverage outlets would be abused? The truth is, too many people were making money from a business. Why does the government not clamp down harder on companies that invent reasons to keep people in the office? The answer is simple – landlords hold a lot of clout within the system.

Singapore’s old model need to be restructured. We need to learn to deal with people from emerging Asia and we also need to understand that the Western world won’t bail us out if it does not suite its interest.

As I get older, I long for the need to want to take certain risk with my future so that I’m not dependent on outdated paradigms. Likewise, the nation needs to do the same. Instead of trying to stick to old models, the government should encourage the people to leap into the future. That, I believe is what we need to do in order for Majullah Singapura to continue being sung loudly and proudly.  

Creating Value by Making Things Less Valuable

 Sometime in April of this year, I decided to write a piece on a quote by Prince Charles, the heir to the British Throne, which was entitled “ALL THE TIME I FEEL I MUST JUSTIFYMY EXISTENCE.” I felt that the quote was post-worthy because it summed up a fact of life and the fact that a man who didn’t have to worry about money was conscious of that was worthy of my few cents of comment.

The vast majority of us need to work to put food on the table. Work involves justifying one’s existence to a party paying the bills. Business people are always trying to prove that their product or service makes life better for customers. Employees constantly need to prove that they are of a value to the system. In a funny way, this is easier when you’re at the bottom of the food chain. If I take myself as an example, my value to my day-job boss is simple. I am strong enough to lift boxes of documents and I don’t have an issue traveling to industrial estates. To my restaurant job bosses, my value is simple – I’m the guy who brings food from the kitchen to the table.

I’m not terribly well paid because it’s been argued that the value of my job (particularly the night one), because the theory is that anyone can do the job I do, and probably at a cheaper price. Hence, to do the job I do, my value needs to be a little more than just moving dishes from point-to-point. Immigration laws protect me in as much as I have the right citizenship and employers need a certain number of locals on the payroll to hire “exploitable” labour. I also do things like I do my best to push booze sales so that I can tell my employers that I make them enough money to pay myself.

It’s easy for me justify my value because it’s easy to describe what I do. However, its also easy for my employers to remove me. They just need to feel that business has slowed and that they can get someone cheaper. Should that happen, removing me from my sources of income would be fairly easy.

However, it’s a different story as you climb higher up the food chain. What exactly does a CEO or a minister do to justify his or her existence to an organization? It’s hard to pin down the individual at the top’s efforts have a direct effect on anything in particular. However, the argument goes, that whatever people at the top are doing, its exceedingly valuable and the value they provide is something only they can bring and therefore worthy of a lot more pay than whatever people at the ground are making. We’ve used this argument for the longest time in Singapore whenever it comes to talking about government salaries.

The answer that the people at the top “create value,” which means that the rest of us have jobs to go to and therefore get to have a better life than we would have otherwise. In Singapore, the argument goes that we need to have the world’s highest paid ministers because we need to attract super competent people to run the show and we don’t want them to turn corrupt. We also argue that we need to share the brains between the public and private sector so that all sides of the economy benefit.

I’ve argued on many occasions that I don’t disagree with this on the surface. Why should the bright and brainy not enter public service and get well paid for it. Why can’t smart public servants be tapped to run public listed companies if they can deliver value?

Where I do question this policy is on two fronts. Firstly, are we really getting the best and brightest and what happens when they fail to deliver “value.”

Let’s take the “CEO’s” job as an example. Modern management theory has it that a CEO is appointed by shareholders to make them money. In the USA, this has led to the use of stock options, which are supposed to make a CEO’s interest aligned with the shareholders who have hired him (they’re usually men). This has created multimillionaires across the board and whenever someone talks about outrageous pay of CEO’s when compared to the average worker, the retort is that the bulk of the CEO’s pay is from stock options and the CEO is only taking a fair share of the wealth he helped to create for shareholders (which does include mutual and pension funds, which workers invest in).

Since, this has been the standard measurement of people at the top, let’s see if this applies to Singapore’s top brass. Have they created vast amounts of wealth that their American counterparts claim to have done?

Let’s take Mr. Ng Yat Chung, the CEO of Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), who is about to do his shareholders a service by selling the company to another Singapore government-controlled conglomerate called Keppel Corporation (Keppel). When the story broke on 2 August 2021, it was mentioned that the offer by Keppel provided SPH shareholders with a 40percent premium of the last traded share price of $1.50 per share. The report can be found at:

https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/companies-markets/keppel-makes-surprise-s22b-bid-to-privatise-sph

So, it looks like Mr. Ng has done what few imagined would be possible in the current market – he’s delivered “value” or “created wealth” for the shareholders who hired him. As a former Chief of Defense Force (CDF), you could argue that by creating “value” for SPH’s shareholders, Mr. Ng has proven the Singapore government’s point of the need to share “value-creating” brains between the public and private sector.

Unfortunately, if you look at things more closely, Mr. Ng hasn’t exactly done that. When Mr. Ng took over as CEO of SPH in September 2017, SPH’s shares were hovering at around $2.76 per share. At the time of the announcement of Keppel’s take over, the share price was hovering around $1.88 per share. If you look at the chart of SPH’s historical share price, it’s very noticeable that SPH’s share price has been on a gradual decline from the day Mr. Ng took over.

https://sginvestors.io/sgx/stock/t39-sph/share-price-history

 

Copyright SG Investors.io

If you look through the share price of SPH in the years that Mr. Ng took over, its very clear that what Mr. Ng has done has been to manage the decline of SPH rather than to create new value adding paths to prosperity for SPH.

One can argue that Mr. Ng was unlucky in the sense that the main business of SPH has been in the print media, which has been on the decline for over a decade. You could argue that it’s just an industry trend and Mr. Ng had bad luck. When the announcement came in May 2021 that SPH would be hiving off its media business into a non-profit company, the government came to his image repairing issue. Our Magically Unconflicted Writer and Enforcer of Laws went as far as to say that there was nothing wrong with governments helping out media businesses:

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/sph-media-restructure-government-help-shanmugam-umbrage-1350241

Unfortunately, Mr. Shanmugam is not exactly correct as can be seen by a comparative share price of some other media companies. Take News Corp, owned by Rupert Murdoch, which has seen its share price rise since 2017 when the share price hovered around US13 per share and at the time of writing now trades at around US$23 per share.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NWS/chart

 

Of course, News Corp has a variety of businesses and is an international company, so one can argue that its TV and radio business does offset whatever happens in the print business.

However, if you look at another company, whose business is to publish a news paper for a financial centre, you’ll also find that the picture does not favour Mr. Ng’s management of SPH. The New York Times Company Limited, which publishes the New York Times saw its share price go from roughly US$18 per share in September 2017 to roughly US$43 per share in its most recent trade.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NYT/chart?p

 

How did these companies expand and grow in tougher markets, whereas SPH failed to grow and in fact declined in its domestic market? There’s no way Mr. Ng could not have seen that his main flagship product was declining in a three-year period and that he could have taken some remedial action.

Are the people on the top really creating value for the rest of us or are they playing semantics to make us assume that some form of value is being created. It’s a question that we could all do well to consider.