"Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that." – Bill Shankley, Former Member of Liverpool FC

 

Depending on who you support, it was either a brilliant Sunday or a pretty lousy one. Liverpool, one of England’s most famous clubs drubbed their long-time rivals Manchester United by five goals to zero, thanks to a hat trick from Egyptian striker “Mohamed Salah. The only possible description of the result was that it was a total humiliation for Manchester United, which for a long time was the “premium club” in the English Premier League.

One of the most striking outcomes of the match was a headline from the Daily Mirror, which called for the sacking of Mr. Ole Gunnar Solsjaer, the former Norwegian player who had helped the club as manager since the sacking of Jose Mourinho in 2017 but also of removing the influence of Sir Alex Ferguson, Manchester United’s legendary manager who served from 1886 to 2013 and retains influence as a director of the club. The story can be found at:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/ferguson-solskjaer-man-utd-liverpool-25284965

 

 The article argued that Manchester United need a “revolution” of sorts in order to get back to its glory days. It pointed out that while Mr. Ole Gunnar Solsjaer had been a decent player in his day, he was simply not up to the job of managing one of the world’s greatest football clubs. However, the bigger problem was not so much the current manager not being up to the job but management of the club was still treating the words of the former manager as gospel and his influence had become a hinderance to what needed to be done.

This main thrust of this article seemed eerily familiar. In Singapore, the main thrust of the Daily Mirror article is very prominent in our most visible spectator sport – politics. Ever since our first Prime Minister and official poster boy for “developing nations,” Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, removed himself from public life in 2011, Singapore has been one what you’d call “automatic pilot.”

Like Manchester United, things seem fairly respectable. We remain high up on the list of key international rankings relating to the standard of living and doing business. Once in a while the government doles out cash to keep the citizens happy and as a few of my friends from elsewhere are prone to say to me, “What exactly are you complaining about? It’s worse elsewhere.”

However, whilst things may look good on the surface, all is not well beneath the surface. Take the management of Covid-19 as an example. Despite rising case numbers and deaths, our numbers look relatively good and our vaccination rates are high. Yet, despite this, our we seem to be running on a rather confused mode. One day, one minister will say that we’ve got to live with the virus and open up. The next day there will be a clamping down on movement. Nobody seems clear about what is going on and our reputation of being boringly predictable has been taking something of a beating.

What’s going on? “Official Singapore” takes pride in good governance. However, if you look at the often-contradictory policies around Covid, it would seem that no one is really taking charge when there is the greatest need for someone to be in charge.

The only time that the government has acted in a seemingly decisive manner has been in passing laws that have the potential to silence critics like the “Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act” (POFOMA), which was passed in 2019 and more recently the “Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act,” (FICA). Whilst nobody is denying the necessity of such acts, the way in which both acts were passed do give our magically unconflicted writer and enforcer of laws a lot of say in defining what type of speech is considered bad for national security.

What’s going on? You could argue that Singapore’s leadership has been looking a little like Manchester United’s in the post Ferguson era – directionless. Whilst our current leaders have not exhibited the gross incompetence of other parts of the world, they’ve been more like managers of a plane on auto-pilot, letting things run along and tinkering with it once in a while. There hasn’t been a “vision” or for want of a corporate term a “mission statement” as to where they see Singapore heading to.

Like Manchester United, Singapore seems a little too fixated with a past leader, specifically our late first Prime Minister, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, who served as our first Prime Minister until he stepped aside in 1990 and stuck around on the tax payer’s dime in the cabinets of his successors first as Senior Minister and then as Minister Mentor.

Being critical of Mr. Lee in Singapore is like being critical of Sir Alex at Man United. It’s bloody hard to do in as much as both men built their respective organizations into something exceedingly successful. As they say, both men were not getting something right – they got most of it right.

However, that very success has become the key problem in as much as their successors have been trying to repeat and regurgitate the old rule book and what was successful in a different era isn’t necessarily the right solution for the moment. Furthermore, unlike Sir Alex, Mr. Lee has been dead for six-years and one would imagine that it would be easier to cut ties with his legacy.

Singapore, like Manchester United needs to be go through a period of leadership renewal. Hopefully Singapore will use Covid-19 just as Manchester United will use this drubbing by Liverpool to do the necessary.