Wednesday, September 30, 2020

Who Says We’re Not Creating Jobs?

 

The main and longest feature in Singapore’s portion of cyberspace is focused on one single issue – namely the issue that foreigners, specifically those from India have been unfairly allowed into to Singapore to rob our local population blind. The grouses on the net comes can be summed up as “This government cares about everyone except the local Singaporean.” If you explore enough websites in Singapore, you will inevitably run into someone with some horror story about this or that company discriminating against nice hard-working Singaporeans in favour of nasty, cheating foreigners from what Donald Trump would call “Shitholes.” The question that people inevitably ask is why is the Singapore government creating an economy that in turn creates jobs from people from everywhere else, except Singapore. The pressure has reached a stage where there is an equal amount of gibberish being sprouted about the importance of building a “Singapore-Core” in the economy.

I’ve described this as gibberish because, well, if you look at Singapore’s political system, you can’t accuse the government of not creating jobs for Singaporeans. The structure of our governmental system would indicate that Singapore has created a number of high paying and highly secure jobs, which can only be filled by Singaporeans.

However, given that I work in corporate restructuring and insolvency, the question that I would ask is whether these jobs are actually producing any value for the Singapore Inc as a whole and whether these jobs could be, well for want of a better term – better utilized. Let’s remember the basics – Singapore is a tiny island, or a small red dot. 

Let’s start at the top. We have a Head of State, who functions pretty much like a combination between the English Monarch and the House of Lords in as much as the President is primarily ceremonial but does have the reserve power to say no to the government, should the government choose to tap on the reserves. Our President was paid in excess of S$4,000,000 a year until 2011, when the public felt that there was no reason for a ceremonial figurehead to earn more than the “Chief Executive” or the “Prime Minister.” The salary of the President was slashed by three quarters, which is still a fairly respectable million plus a year and the question remains, what do we get for a million dollars?

Well, the president does wave on National Day and once in a while they do host a dinner or so for a visiting dignitary. Former President SR Nathan, did spend a good deal of time trying to organize charity events. However, that’s pretty much it. Can anyone think of a President who used their time in office to create nation wide projects? Mr. Nathan was criticized in some quarters for being a laky of the government. However, in fairness, he did initiate the President’s Star Charity, which raised money for charitable organizations.  As a prominent member of our local Indian business community (one of the few local Indians to have made it to a regional role in a multinational) said, “At least we knew we had a president.”

Then there is the management committee or the cabinet. Where we have a grand total of some 30 over appointment holders. To set this into context, we have a similar amount of people in the cabinet as some of our larger Asian neighbours, or should I say countries that are faced with issues like poverty and social unrest. By way of a quick comparison, Singapore (population of 5 million and few problems) than Japan (population of 120 plus million and nasty neighbours with nukes) and slightly less than India (population over a billion and an equal amount of problems). The links of the respective cabinets can be found at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_Japan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Council_of_Ministers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_Singapore

Furthermore, if you look at the Singapore cabinet list, you’ll notice a few interesting facts. We have two senior ministers. The post of senior minister was used to give Lee Kuan Yew a consultancy gig. The post was later abolished in 2011. So, why do we need to revive the post and give it to our two former deputy prime ministers? If memory serves me correctly, the senior minister was the second highest paid person after the Prime Minister.

Then there is the fact that our Ministries have one minister, a second minister (ministry of finance has two), and a minister of state (several grades) and senior parliamentary secretary. Let’s not forget Singapore is a small island with limited resources, so it’s not unfair question to ask why our ministries need so many appointment holders.

One might argue that there are a number of names that appear more than once. Josephine Teo is both Minister of Manpower and Second Minister at the Home Affairs Ministry. Mr. K Shanmugam is most famously in the “non-conflict” position of both Minister of Home Affairs and Law. The valid question here is, are they getting more than one salary per ministry or if they are only getting one salary, how do they divide their time between ministries (At a million dollars a year, exclusivity is a fair demand).

Let’s not forget that Singapore’s ministers are the world’s best paid. The lowest paid one gets a million a year. A cabinet of 30 plus ministers is 30 million a year.

Then if you go down the food chain, you’ll come to the interesting fact that Singapore has five mayors, each one earning around $600,000 per person per year. Mayors in the Singapore context run Community Development Councils (CDCs), which is a collection of several constituencies. Mayors are supposed to run social programs on the ground.

I stress the point that Singapore is a tiny place. We are like the “City-States” in Ancient Greece and our geographical size (or lack of) means that the most appropriate comparisons are not with countries but with cities, and even then, we’re still pretty small. Our Prime Minister’s job is not like his global counterparts, it’s more like the mayor of other big cities. Think of London, for example, as a separate from the rest of the UK. Sadiq Khan would then be called “Prime Minister” instead of Mayor.

Yet, the City of Singapore has five mayors and the question that should be asked is “Why?” What value do our mayors bring to the table. Are they doing something beyond the scope of ordinary members of parliament?

Covid-19 has screwed up the global economy. Companies round the world are downsizing to save costs.  Given that Singapore’s leadership likes to compare itself with the best of enterprises, isn’t it time we started looking at slimming down unnecessary layers of bureaucracy? Unless that is of course, this would ruin the chances of certain Singaporeans to stay in high paying and highly secured jobs.   


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Maira Gall