At the start of this month, I based out a piece called “IT’S EASIER TO GET MORE FROM AN EXISTING CUSTOMER THAN TO LOOK FOR A NEW ONE,” (December 6, 2021) where I talked about how the Singapore government was so obsessed in being world class at this and that to the extent of pouring millions into getting things from elsewhere but somehow couldn’t help but screw up the locals who had the talent to be world class.
The obvious comparisons were in classical music where
we had built the Esplanade and great cost and continue to run at a loss in the name
of building a cultural scene. However, we won’t let the only known Singapore-born
classical pianist into Singapore because he didn’t serve his national service even
though he left Singapore as a child and had since become British. The same is
true in sports where we will spend millions so that world-class European level
clubs play in Singapore yet when it came to two boys who were offered a
contract to play at the highest of levels, the government said no, they had to
serve the army first (which would have made them redundant to the clubs that
were offering the contracts).
Its not like the problems with the individuals would
have been costly or painful. The issue at hand were simple and could have been
solved with a little bit of flexibility – which is a quality that the Singapore
government does have.
Yet, the powers that be chose not to demonstrate flexibility
to allow talented Singapore-born people to flourish. Its as if the government
would rather commit vast amounts of tax payer funds to grand projects than to negotiate
a simple paper exercise to allow local talents to flourish.
This mad desire to promote everything except the
home-grown talent, is not limited to sports and music. I spent over a decade as
a freelance consultant and my personal experiences suggests that one of the
largest hurdles that local SME’s and one-man operations face is a system that
treats small enterprises as a nuisance rather than the backbone of the economy,
as they are in any other place. Like it or not, it’s the foreigners whom many
Singaporeans accuse of “stealing jobs” who are more inclined to give business
to the SMEs that hire the bulk of Singaporeans.
I was reminded that this isn’t just my personal
experience, when I ran into a Linkedin posting of a local surgical mask maker
and a local manufacturer of temperature sensors:
Both made the point that their products were as good, if not better than the products from elsewhere. Yet they faced greater hurdles than their foreign competitors when trying to get their products into the local market. One of the gentlemen provided a clip from the Straits Times, which talked about the difficulties that local ART test manufacturers faced when trying to get their products to market:
I’ve used the economic rice stall as an example of how
SMEs are treated. These small shops feed the local population healthier and tastier
stuff at less cost than fast food joints and hotel chains. Yet, they often pay rents
and do not get “government mandated business” in the same way that the hotels
get “quarantine” business. A restaurant for example can now sit up to five to a
table. A hawker stall is still restricted to two per table.
What’s clear is that Singapore’s SME sector is not so
much challenged by the usual challenges of running a business (cash flow, competition
etc) but by a system that favours everyone else except the local entrepreneur. What
at stake here? I would say creating opportunities to create a good livelihood for
the locals. Instead of spending billions to attract people who don’t need the
money to spend money on unproductive things, the government merely needs to
ensure that our local entrepreneurs play by the same rules as everyone else.
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