“The worst thing that happened to you, that can happen to any fighter: you got civilized.” – Micky to Rocky in Rocky III

 

Ever since I started watching more Netflix, I’ve started to appreciate how art and life imitate each other. Sometimes, its possible to draw news commentary from movies, as it so happened when I saw a story in Mothership, which described how our Second Minister of Finance, Ms. Indranee Rajah ended up arguing with Non-Constituency Member of Parliament, Mr. Leong Mun Wai over the funding that the government was handing out to SPH Media Trust, the non-profit that had taken over the entire media business from what was then called Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), a listed for-profit company. The story can be found at:

https://mothership.sg/2022/10/leong-mun-wai-public-expenditure-indranee-rajah/

 

The argument between Ms. Rajah and Mr. Leong centred around the issue as to why it was necessary for the tax payer to fund what had been until recently a license for printing money. Ms. Rajah, it seems, took issue to the fact that Mr. Leong seemed to imply that this subsidy to the media was an implication that the government was not being prudent.

Since, I am earning below the rate of competence (pegged at $500,000 a year), I shall leave the debate on financial management to the people earning the rate of competence. However, what I will point out is that moving the print business into a non-profit and funding it is a sign of what is perhaps the biggest problem in Singapore – a lack of competition.

As a whole, one of the biggest gripes that Singaporeans have is that, we live in a competitive society. If you listen to enough young parents at play, competition is thrust upon every Singaporean before they’re born. Parents start competing for places in the best day care centres long while the kid is the womb and school is essentially a cut throat place, where kids are not only expected to ace exams but get involved in the right extracurricular activities and so on. Competition doesn’t stop there. When you start work, you enter a “rat-race” to earn the biggest and best pay checks to live in increasingly expensive housing and to drive increasingly expensive cars. Add to that, the government is now trying to get us to compete in having more children, who will be better and brighter than everyone else.

So, as far as the average Singaporean is concerned, we live in a ruthless place and you can’t afford to be a nice person. I remember my ex-wife yelling at me whenever I thought it was ok to chill out instead of planning for the big wedding she was hoping for. Her most common phrase being “This is NOT an ANG MOH (White man) COUNTRY – THIS IS SINGAPORE.”

However, while competition for every little thing in Singapore can seem a little intense to most, we aren’t exactly the competitive society that we like to portray ourselves as. While school kids face competition of the most intense sort, there’s actually very little “real” competition for grown-ups or more specifically “special” grownups. If anything, competition is regarded as something that is only for the poor and stupid.

Our scholarship system is the prime example of this. We take our best and brightest and train them at the world’s best universities. Then, we give them good, stable jobs in the government. Original concept of getting the best and brightest to serve the nation is not wrong. However, the act of removing these guys from facing any form of competition has meant that we end up wasting the best and brightest and dealing with competition is left to people below the rate of competence.

Let’s think about it. We are supposed to have the world’s best government (hence we pay more than anyone else for our ministers). We have the “best” people running our home grown “big brands.” Yet despite 57-years of Independence our manpower policy is only about attracting people from elsewhere to do the jobs rather than encouraging Singaporeans to go overseas and make their mark.

Take our “Rolls Royce” ministers for example. As far as I know, only George Yeo went onto take a top job outside of Singapore and more importantly outside anything controlled by the Singapore government when he became Chairman and Executive Director of Kerry Logistics. I remember when I worked on 3M’s PR in the early 2000s, it was considered exciting news to have a Singaporean running 3M’s HR department. When we complain about Indian nationals running the local branch of a multinational, we forget that India (admittedly a small segment of India) does produce people like Ajay Banga former CEO of Master Card and Indra Nooyi, former CEO of Pepsico. It’s much tougher to think of a Singaporean, educated in the system who ran anything outside the HR department in an organisation not controlled by the Singapore government.

The best explanation for this is found in two scenes in Rocky III. The first is when Micky wants to walk out on Rocky for taking Clubber Lang’s challenge because he believes that Rocky is going to be “killed,” His argument is simple – Rocky has not been hungry since he won the belt and has become “civilised,” whilst Clubber is hungry and has become a “wrecking machine.”  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONit4ATZmhw

 

 The second scene that sums this up, comes when Apollo Creed, Rocky’s former rival offers to train him. He says that when Rocky won the title from him, he had the “Eye of the Tiger.”

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

 

 

Any native-born Singaporean with the “eye of the tiger” is encouraged to become “civilised.” Life becomes comfortable. Prime example is our one and only Olympic God Medallist, who had the “eye of the tiger” before 2016. He faced competition in the American eco-system from hungry competitors. His form has been, well, a little off since he won the medal, came home and became “civilised” by the Singapore Government.

Logic has it that a government stuffed by people who believe competition is for the little people, will not want hungry journalist talking to them. It is easier to fund them than to have them become like British regional media, which jumped at the chance to ask the tough questions of the Prime Minister, which the national media admitted they would have refrained from (regional media only speaks to Number 10 once every five years, national media by contrast worry about being cut off from access).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q0rlT-5oxE

 

There is, as they say, a difference between the media asking “where were you,” and the media explaining why you weren’t there during a crisis.