Thursday, September 17, 2020

What Went Wrong?

 

One of the most interesting things about watching politics in Singapore is trying to decipher cryptic messages. This was first brought to my attention sometime in 2005 when the then President SR Nathan was contemplating his second run for office. He started out by announcing that he was old, in ill health and wanted to live out his days without the stress of being in the Istana. A few weeks later, he was asked the same question and he gave a cryptic reply of “Ask God,” and God promptly sent him back to the Istana for another six years. It was a former editor-in-chief of the Today newspaper, who recounted this incident to me and he said, “In Singapore, there’s only one God.”

Tonight, I was reminded that we’ve had another great cryptic line, which came from our law and home affairs minister (in Singapore there is no conflict of interest between the law maker and law enforcer) at the end of the Parti Liyani trial. Mr. K. Shanmugam said, “something has gone wrong.” The report can be read at:

 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/parti-liyani-changi-airport-group-chairman-maid-shanmugam-13091378

While most of us (politicians being in the minority) saw that something was clearly wrong, the question was put to me – “Would he have said something has gone wrong if the appeal had failed and the maid went to jail?”

I’d like to think better of the minister, but I’d probably be wrong. Had Ms. Liyani been convicted, nobody would have made a sound. Sure, the internet would have been ablaze with tales of how screwed up life is for poor domestic workers but eventually things would have died down and people would have shrugged and moved on with their lives. Liew Mun Leong would still be contributing greatly to the country by collecting an outsized pay cheque and the majority of middle-class Singaporeans would probably the relived by the fact that the foreign domestic worker population understood their place in the scheme of things.

That didn’t happen. Liew Mun Leong’s friends have been busy rushing to remind us that he’s done a lot (without mentioning that he was paid a lot) for the country and the man in charge of the justice system (both upholding and enforcing it) has become very busy trying to find out what went wrong.

The question for many of us is what does the man in charge of making and enforcing laws believe what went wrong. My cynical friend said that the main thing that went wrong was the fact that a maid earning $600 a month refused to be brow beaten into knowing her place in the system and a judge found that she had facts as opposed to the multimillionaire former CEO who had reported her to the authorities.

I’d like to be more optimistic and believe that our minister in charge of the police and the courts is very keen as to how the police felt that it was OK for them not to take evidence into custody and allowed the Liew’s to use materials in the boxes where the “stolen” goods were supposed to be kept. I would like to think our minister running our justice system would be interested in how a district judge felt that an unreliable witness was as credible as a rock.

So, the question remains – what went wrong and what is that wrong that the Minister is keen to discover. I’d be grateful if someone would tell me that I’m right and my friend is wrong about the Minister’s focus on what went wrong.    

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Maira Gall