One of the things that the Singapore government is very good
at is coming up with quirky terms and coining phrases. When the late Indonesian
President called us “a Little Red Dot,” we proceeded to turn it into a catch
phrases of sorts of things. Then there’s the word “hub,” which when used by
Singapore’s elite often refers to the fact that we are a “hub” for all sorts of
things.
The most inventive contribution to the English language to
come out of Singapore is in the play on the word “entrepreneur.” In the early
1990s, when the government tried to get Singaporeans to be more “entrepreneurial”
in the technology sector, we had the term “technopreneur,” which was
essentially an entrepreneur who had set up a business that involved some sort
of technology. In the Singapore context, Silicon Valley is filled with “Techopreneurs.”
The latest group of “preneurs” that the Singapore government
is trying to breed are known as “Hawkerpreneurs.” Thanks to UNESCO, the
Singapore government has suddenly realized that Singapore’s food vendors or
hawkers form an invaluable part of Singapore’s cultural landscape. Hawkers have
fed generations of Singaporeans and are the very reason why Singapore is
described as a “food paradise.” More importantly (particularly from a
government calculation of revenue from elsewhere perspective), whenever friends
from abroad come and visit us, we always feel the need to bring them to a “hawker
centre.”
There is, however, one tiny snag to this most Singaporean of
institutions. Old Hawkers are getting too old to continue doing what they do
and the kids simply don’t want to sit over a stove 24/7 to make a basic living.
It’s true that many outdoor hawker centres are giving way to cooler
airconditioned food courts, but even then, the life of a hawker is tough. It’s
long hours and physically demanding. While you do hear stories of how there are
hawkers who have made enough for a Mercedes and to send their kids to
university; you’ll find that the hawkers who have sent their kids to university
for the very purpose of ensuring that their kids will not have to be hawkers.
As Tan Tee Seng says in the following article, being hawker was a way for the
less fortunate to earn a living and not to set up a “legacy” business:
https://www.tremeritus.net/2021/01/19/hawkerpreneur-simi-sai-is-this/
So, the government has a dilemma. It has “hawker culture,”
which gives it a source of revenue and the reality that people are not rushing
to set up hawker stalls. What can be done about it?
The answer that the government has come up with – is pretty
much its answer for everything else. Throw money at the problem until it is no
longer a problem. If you look at what the government is proposing for “hawkerpreneurs,”
it is pretty much the same as what it has done for “technopreneurs,” as can be
seen by the following link:
As in the case of “technopreneurship,” it’s a case of
offering money, either through direct grants or subsidizing venture capital, as
well as making mentorship more easily accessible. The following link from the
National Environment Agency (“NEA”) provides an outline of the government’s
plans for developing an already developed hawker culture:
The latest game is to come up with a course, to qualify young
people for “hawkerpreneurship” as is outlined by this article:
https://mothership.sg/2021/01/young-hawker-work-study-post-diploma-nea/
Yes, there actually is an assumption that since you can get a
qualification in “hawkerpreneurship,” bright young things will want to enter
the industry. Details of the program can be found at:
https://www.tp.edu.sg/wsphawkerpreneurship
Unfortunately, our bureaucrats haven’t quite understood that
there is a key difference between a technology start up and a food stall.
People set up high tech-start ups and slog their guts out because there’s a
hope of selling out to a bigger company or through IPO for an untold fortune.
There’s the satisfaction of the possibility of changing the way people live through
your technology. By contrast, being hawker involves a lot of hard work for a more
work and the odds of being bought out by a huge company are nonexistent. Even
if you have a qualification in “hawker,” the reality of operating a “hawker”
business remains the same.
I’m not against having courses per se. Its good to have
people in the food business trained to a recognized standard of things like hygiene
and service standards. However, a course and qualification are not going to
change ground realities and you’re not going to attract your best and brightest
into a business until certain ground realities change.
As I have argued previously, the biggest factor affecting
hawkers is rent. Rents for a small stall remain high and as long as they do, the
healthy portion of the hawker hard work will end up going to feed the
landlords. Think about it, a stall in United Square can be something like
$5,000 plus a month. A hawker selling chicken rice at $4 a plate will need to
sell 1,250 plates of chicken rice every month just to cover the rent (and food
cost hasn’t even been deducted). Perhaps it’s me being what my biggest fan on
TRemeritus calls being “inferior,” but I don’t see the prospect of needing to
sell 1,250 plates of chicken rice a month just to pay a landlord being
attractive to anyone coming out of any of our educational institutions.
So, instead of trying to “glamourize” what is by its very
nature a tough business, perhaps the real solution is to look at the original
purpose of being a “hawker,” which was to give the poorer people an opportunity
to develop a means of making a living.
Singapore currently has plenty of less educated workers from
“developing” Asia, who are willing to do the “tough” jobs that our locals won’t
do. Perhaps we should make it easier for this group to become hawkers. Sure,
they’ll bring certain flavours from their original nations into our food mix
but then again, isn’t that a natural part of culture, where people adapt and
change things accordingly.
Government is missing an opportunity to use the hawkers to
integrate people and cultures. Instead throwing money at the unwilling, shouldn’t
it be trying to cultivate the willing?
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