Since I’ve had a piece published on TRemeritus and had
had the usual accusation of being part of the PAP Spin machinery, I thought I
would start by giving kudos to one of the greatest banding exercises conducted
by the Singapore government – namely using the name “Red Dot.” The inventor of
the term was Indonesia’s third President, Mr. BJ Habibie, whom allegedly had
used it in disparaging manner. We took this insult and turned it into a very
successful brand.
I think of this branding exercise because the
government recently tried to do something similar, only this time it was an effort
to turn a common complaint about the Singapore government into a virtue. The
leader of the opposition, Mr. Pritam Singh had coined the phrase “Ownself check
ownself” when talking about the government’s disdain for opposition voices. The
phrase caught on and is used consistently whenever someone wants to complain
about the lack of alternative views in Singapore.
Given that the phrase had gathered something of a following,
our minister of health, Mr. Ong Ye Kung, decided that it was time to turn the
phrase around to the advantage of the government and so, at an event organized by
the Institute of Policy Studies on 13 January 2022, Mr. Ong stated that he believed
that “Ownself-check-ownself” as a virtue of the Singapore government. His arguments
can be found at:
I will leave the details of his arguments to the more
intelligent. However, I will argue that Mr. Ong has a point when he says that
there needs to be a system of checks and balances to keep the government of the
day fairly honest. Mr. Ong talked about a “non-politicised” civil service,
independent organs of state like the auditor general’s office, an independent
judiciary and a public service commission that appoints civil servants.
As with many things said by the Singapore government,
his claim is backed by the fact that we still rank pretty well in many
international comparisons. I’ve often stated that whenever I’ve wanted to complain
about things, I get people from the US and Europe looking at me and saying “What
are you complaining about?” In a way, Covid amplifies this. Say what you like
about the various lock downs and social restrictions but our Covid numbers are
a darn sight better than most places, including the world leader in Covid infections
and deaths – the USA.
Having said all of that, there are flaws in Mr. Ong’s arguments.
The most glaring flaw is that his argument is self-serving. As he promoted “Ownself-check-ownself,”
as a virtue, Mr. Ong proceeded to reiterate one of the government’s most used
lines – namely the fact that Singapore is too small to have a two-party system.
https://mothership.sg/2022/01/ong-ye-kung-two-party-system-unlikely/
Mr. Ong’s argument betrays one of the biggest
weaknesses in Singapore’s system – namely the fact that the ruling elite has
lost touch with basic laws of nature, which state that in order to survive,
species need to evolve and the only way they evolve is when they’re forced to
by competition.
The ruling party and its various entities have been
using Singapore’s smallness to justify their monopoly on just about everything.
A two-party system won’t work because we are small is like saying there can
only be one monopoly provider of services because the market is too small for
competition (a phrase used when the media duopoly was losing money because they
had to compete in each other’s markets).
Mr. Ong’s lack of understanding of the virtues of
competition lead to the second major flaw in his argument, namely the
assumption that the system will forever be perpetuated by good and wonderful
people.
Sure, “ownself-check-ownself” is a virtue if the
people running the system have a miraculous way of resisting the temptation of power,
money and other external influences indefinitely. Unfortunately, this only
happens in Confucian wet dreams.
Interestingly enough, the best reasoning can be found
in our education system, where Singapore gets its kids to take O-Levels and
A-Levels which aren’t even marked in Singapore. Why do we insist on sending our
public exam papers to be marked in the UK despite being independent from the UK
after nearly six-decades?
Could it be the fact that this ensures that the exams
taken by Singapore’s students have a certain credibility because they’re marked
by someone who has no possibility of knowing who our students are and having an
interest in them passing an exam? Whatever the reason, we don’t seem to be in a
rush to have “ownself-check-ownself” in our education system. Why isn’t anyone
suggesting that Singapore is too small for school children to be measured
against a common standard set on the global stage?
The other flaw in Mr. Ong’s argument is that he
assumes that competition comes about because of size. It doesn’t. It comes
about because the monopoly starts to get shoddy and takes its position of
dominance for granted. It sees no need to evolve and slowly but surely other players
start to form and chip away at the dominant players’ market.
The ruling party needs to look at what happened elsewhere.
India’s Congress Party was pretty much THE political party in India. Same was
true of the Kuomintang in Taiwan and the PRI in Mexico. These parties were
dominant, got stagnant and blown into opposition because they lost touch with
the voters, who found someone else who offered them what they wanted.
Ironically, as Mr. Ong was defending “Ownself-check-ownself,”
the United Kingdom, was providing an example of what happens when a political
party dominates for too long. The Conservative Party, which came into power in
2010 and won election after election, ended up with a Prime Minister who didn’t
believe in “ownself-check-ownself” and proceeded to thrown parties in Downing
Street while making it illegal for everyone else to have indoor gatherings.
Just take a look at the following clips from the Financial Times and Daily Telegraph,
which are not bastions of liberalism by any means.
https://www.ft.com/content/3e81d26f-2902-458d-bb8c-a36fe6b59ddf
; and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iytKZKm3Jbs
We know that facing competition is healthy. We subject our kids to a competitive education system and measure their success based on exams that are also taken by kids from elsewhere. Nobody tells our kids that they can “ownself-check-ownself,” or that the market is too small for them. So, why the hell are we holding our adults to lesser standards than our kids and why do we think it’s a virtue for our adults to live up to lesser standards?
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