I remember my Dad and I once had a discussion about money. I
was still at school and he wasn’t happy with how I was spending things. He made
the point that despite the good things we had around us, he was not a rich man
with infinite resources. Everything he had was reinvested into his business.
This conversation summed up the importance of money. While
money is not everything, it plays a vital part in most of what we do. Money is
not the root of all evil – it is the root of most things and business people,
including the ones that are doing well, will always remind you that whatever
surplus they earn has to be invested back into the business. Hans Hofer, the
founder of Apa Guides once said that he only made money from his business when
he sold his business and did other things.
I remembered these conversations and as I started
freelancing in an industry where people are expected to work for foreign
multinationals, I learnt two valuable lessons. The first lesson was the fact
that money is power. The guys with the money will inevitably squeeze those
without. The guy who has the advantage in a business negotiation is inevitably
the guy with money in the bank. It is, as they say, easier to tell someone to
f** off when you have enough money to worry about not having that job or
project.
The second lesson I learnt was that there was a clear
difference in attitudes towards money between those working for someone else
and those who were employed. Big ticket items like posh meals, fancy wines,
swanky hotel rooms and business class tickets were inevitably bought by those
on expense accounts. The self-employed, including the successful ones, tended
to be a little more conservative with their spending. It is inevitably easier
to spend someone else’s money.
These lessons I took from the world of business seem to
apply to electoral politics. The winner of any given election is inevitably the
party that has the resources to spend. American elections are particularly well
known for this. Candidates need to raise hundreds of millions to get past the
finish line.
It isn’t much different in the Westminster System, where its
often said that elections are lost by governments rather than won by opposition
parties. Singapore’s government, for example is pretty good at dishing out goodies
before an election.
It has also has been particularly good at buying over
potential opponents. Our scholarship system is designed to bring bright and
potential trouble makers onside. Two of our more prominent ministers (Tharman
Shanmugaratnam and Vivian Balakrishnan) are examples of two bright sparks, who had
However, Singapore’s ruling party has run into a few
challenges recently. The first one is the fact that potential opponents in the
opposition are increasingly financially independent like former Worker’s Party
Member of Parliament, Chen Show Mao, who was a partner at David Polk & Wardwell,
a law firm with over a billion in revenue. Telling someone they can afford a
condominium in a few years of working for you just doesn’t quite have the same
effect on a man who is already living in a condominium.
The second challenge comes from an attitude towards
resources. At the end of the recent election, the Prime Minister announced that
Mr. Pritam Singh, leader of the Worker’s Party would be given the title “Leader
of the Opposition,” which would be recognized office in the apparatus of the
state which comes with a salary and staff.
This is office is found in other Commonwealth Jurisdictions
like the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and India. However, in the
Singapore context this was revolutionary in the sense that it was official recognition
of “opposition” parties as a legitimate force. The cynics also argued that it was
a sign of taming the Worker’s Party with an effective bribe.
However, Mr. Singh threw a wrench into the works by donating
half of his salary increase. This announcement instantly brought him into the cross
hairs of one of the ruling party’s most prominent trolls, Mr. Calvin Cheng, who
complained that the Prime Minister’s donations didn’t get the good press that
Mr. Singh’s was getting:
To make matters worse, Ms. Ho Ching, the Prime Minister’s
wife, CEO of Temasek Holdings (Singapore’s Family Office), and the only person
whose salary is a state secret joined in the fray:
Mr. Singh has clarified that he wasn’t giving away half his
salary but half his salary increase:
Why are people associated with the ruling party getting
upset by Mr. Singh’s donation? The obvious point would be that it doesn’t make
them look good. The act of forgoing the salary increase (which is considerably
less than the lowest paid political office holder) has started what the Malay
Mail described as a potential charity war and made Mr. Singh look better than
the ruling party office holders:
The less noticed and talked about point is that Mr. Singh probably
had no choice in donating his new salary increase. If you look carefully at
what Mr. Singh has said he would donate to, you’d note that it is primarily
towards grassroots causes in the areas that his party controls.
The Worker’s Party is playing a long-term game. Strategy is
simple – win seats, keep taking care of constituents to stay elected and then
challenge for seats when you have enough strength. Unfortunately for Mr. Singh,
his options of executing that strategy are particularly limited in as much as
the main source of funding comes from the government, which is controlled by
the ruling party, which unashamedly works on the principle of delaying funding
to wards that it does not control.
Hence, Mr. Singh has to find different ways of funding the
programs that his constituents need. The donation of his salary increase can be
seen in the same light as a small shop keeper investing a windfall back into
the business.
It’s different for the ruling party in as much as it
controls official purse strings. Ruling party members of parliament (MPs) can
afford to behave like executives on a generous expense account because getting
the money is simply a question of following official rules on accountability.
Someone who comes from a position where he does not have to find
ways and means of creating a budget will not be able to understand the motives
of someone who is operating in a system where he or she has to get creative
about raising the money.
While it will be sometime before the Worker’s Party will be
in a position to fight for the government, the lack of resources is inevitably
good for it. Its MPs will be trained to think of their wards like microenterprises
with limited resources. This mindset will produce people who should be able to
come up with creative solutions to the more complex problems of the modern age.
Hopefully, a stronger opposition will also help improve
efficiency in the government. One can only hope that the increase in dissenting
voices will get ruling party MP’s to think more creatively in order to get
things past parliament. In business, big conglomerates like General Electric
have started to work on the principle that they need to behave like smaller
enterprises. Hopefully the same will happen in politics.
