Drug Dealing 101

 There are only three occasions when the decisions of the Singapore judiciary make the headlines of the international press. The three occasions are:

• 1.     When one of our senior politicians sues someone for defamation and inevitably wins a lot of money;
• 2.     When we either cane or hang a citizen of a Western country and end up in a diplomatic row, which inevitably makes us more popular with certain segments of population in the Western country; and
• 3.     When lots of money of a foreign government is involved.

So, it was a pleasant surprise to find that we made the international new for doing something different. As reported in the Guardian, we decided to stay the execution of a man whose intelligence can only be politely described as “slow,” (It is undisputed that Mr. Nagaenthran Dharmalingam, who is due to hang has an IQ of 69. The IQ of an average person is 100. He is by definition as person of below average intelligence). The story can be found below:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/08/outrage-as-singapore-prepares-to-execute-man-with-learning-disabilities-over-drugs-charges

 

Given that executions for drug crimes are never stayed, the very act of staying the execution was considered an act of “divine” intervention. As was expressed by Mr. M. Ravi, the lawyer for Mr. Dharmalingam on his personal Facebook page:

 

Taken from the Facebook page of Mr. M. Ravi

Given the fact that this is a drug case of a Malaysian Tamil who has been proven to be a person of low intelligence, I’m going to state that this is probably the biggest exercise in false hop. As Ms. Kirstin Han states on her Facebook page:

 

Taken from the Facebook page of Ms. Kirstin Han

A lot has been said about this impending execution, which I shall leave to the better qualified. I will, however, state that the powers that be were depressingly predictable. Whilst it is an undisputed fact that Mr. Dharmalingam is “slow,” the judges decided that whilst slow, he definitely knew the consequences of his actions and therefore the capable of weighing up the consequences of his actions.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/court-dismisses-nagaenthran-dharmalingam-malaysian-drug-trafficker-death-row-2298771

The Ministry of Home Affairs also went out of its way to issue a statement to say that they had given Mr. Dharmalingam due process:

https://www.mha.gov.sg/mediaroom/press-releases/mha-statement-in-response-to-further-media-queries-regarding-nagaenthran-a-l-k-dharmalingam

Whilst these reactions were predictable, there was a disturbing article in Today, which made it sound like Mr. Dharmalingam was actually Machiavellian in his claims to be “stupid.”

https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/drug-trafficker-death-row-found-high-court-have-altered-accounts-reflect-lower-education

 

The official answer to why the powers that be are now so keen to hang Mr. Dharmalingam is that “Singapore has a zero tolerance to drug trafficking.” Everyone who enters Singapore is warned that the penalty for drug trafficking is hanging and because we are so strict, nobody in their right mind wants to smuggle drugs into Singapore. The official argument is that “hanging” is a “deterrent.” As sad and traumatic as Mr. Dharmalingam’s impending execution is for his family and the group of activists who have been fighting to save his life over the last decade is, “we” need to send a message to the world that anyone bringing a certain number of drugs into the country will enjoy a one-way ticket to the gallows.

If one trawls the coffee shops, it would seem that this argument is by and large accepted by the general population. In 2011, when we executed Van Tuong Nguyen, an Australian citizen of Vietnamese decent (and the last person who caused a diplomatic row with a Western country), I had friends who remarked that this just highlighted the different attitudes towards drugs in Asian and Western societies. The standard Singaporean reply is that our streets are drug free when compared to a good many places in the Western world.

Whilst this argument is generally accepted, we have to ask ourselves if the death penalty is really a deterrent and if it a deterrent, how effective is it really?

On the surface of things, one could say that there is an argument that our strategy is working. In the 21-year that I’ve lived in Singapore (including visiting the dubious areas), it’s been damn near impossible to get a bag of weed. By comparison, getting hold of drugs wasn’t an issue when I lived in London. If you look at statistics, we do measure up pretty well when compared to most places and there is also the point that the death penalty for drug trafficking is not unique to Singapore and as the Ministry of Home Affairs would point out – we do go through the due process – there is no equivalent of Duterte’s war on drugs.

However, if you look closely enough, the picture is not as rosy as one might imagine. Singapore has “drug abusers” and that figure has been pretty steady over the 3,000 mark over a nine-year period:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1007331/dug-abuser-numbers-singapore/

 

Whilst the government celebrated a fall in the number of drug abusers from 2019 to 2020, it found that many of the drug abusers were first timers and young. Details can be found in the following report from the Straits Times:

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/fewer-drug-abusers-arrested-in-2020-but-many-of-them-first-time-and-young

Let’s stress that the statistics that we have are only for the ones who get arrested by the Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) and we have to account for the fact that there many more drug users whom manage to fly under the radar of CNB.

Logic has it that our annual 3,000 plus drug abusers must be getting their drugs from somewhere and given that Singapore has made it clear that it is not about to liberalise drug laws, one can only conclude that the drugs are coming through an illegal source.

So, how is it that drugs get into Singapore when there’s a death penalty to deter people from wanting to get into the drug business? This argument assumes that people like me (middle aged working professional with a family and house) might want to enter the business. For someone like me, the cost of getting caught out weigh whatever I could make from the business.

However, the guys who enter the business and end up getting caught are not people like me. If you look at the list of notable hangings from drug trafficking, the only person who could be described as “working professional” or having “something to lose” were he to get caught was Johannes Van Damme, a Dutch national who was working as an engineer. The rest were from what you’d call desperate backgrounds. Here is a list of the notable cases:

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

 

The Ministry of Home Affairs likes to point out that we need to be strict on drugs because our status as a port city in the middle of region for the drug trade makes us vulnerable. What it forgets to mention is that we’re in a region filled with desperate and poor people who will take risk that the average Singaporean won’t consider in order to feed their families.

I don’t disagree with the principle of deterring drug pushing or any criminal activity for that matter. Whilst the death penalty has to “deterred” certain people from entering the business, it hasn’t actually done anything to eliminate the drug trade within Singapore or to stop people from taking up a drug habit.  There are people who are doing quite nicely from our domestic drug trade and somehow avoiding that one-way ticket to the gallows.

Sure, our numbers look low compared to other places. However, Singapore is a small place that is relatively easy to police. So, we must ask, are the “low” figures due to policing or the death penalty?

Sure, the death penalty is an opportunity for the powers that be to look tough on crime by killing off the people that “don’t matter,” to anyone else other than a few activists and their immediate families (specifically dark-skinned people from S***hole countries).

If we wanted to “deter” drug trafficking and other lucrative criminal activities, we should perhaps consider tightening up our enforcement on money laundering. Should we consider hanging light-skinned bankers, lawyers and accountants for money laundering the way we hang dark-skinned people from s**hole countries?

If you look at things carefully enough, you’ll realise that instead of deterring drug dealers, it’s actually made them cleverer about their business activities (don’t engage violence and don’t be the guy carrying the stuff).

 

The Problem with Being Successful – or What Do You Do to a Driver that Won’t Wake Up After being Slapped?

 Everyone wants to be a success. If you look through any given book shop, you’ll find that the section on how to be a success takes up a good portion of the store. An entire industry has grown around telling people how to be successful. I remember having a former client who gave up an electronics store that had been in the family for generations so that they could move into the “Holistic Books Business.” The reason for this change was, as one of the members of this family explained – “Have you noticed that every motivational speaker is a multimillionaire?”

Having success is wonderful and that’s not just in the material sense of the word. Successful people are inevitably happy because success does bring a sense of achievement. People who are “failures” tend to be miserable because there’s sense of “screwing up.”

Having said all that, there is a caveat, which motivational speakers inevitably fail to tell you about. Success produces a unique set of problems. These problems are most visible in family businesses where a “successful” patriarch screws up by hanging onto long or failing to prepare the heirs for the reality of life. Recent history has shown that there are businesses that become so great at what they’re doing that they “own” the space they’re in and then the next day they’re gone. One only has to think of Kodak, which was the by-word for film and Nokia, which was effectively “THE TELCO.” Kodak had to reinvent itself after emerging from bankruptcy in 2013 and Nokia sold its once dominant handphone business to Microsoft for a mere five billion dollars (which was a fraction of what it was once worth). Kodak didn’t see people moving away from film to digital and Nokia didn’t think smart phones would catch on.

What is true in business also happens in politics. Long standing political parties that have become a by word for the government end have ended up losing power to “opposition” that was more in tune with what the electorate wanted. The examples that come to mind are the PRI in Mexico and the Kuomintang in Taiwan. In a way, these were the lucky parties. Defeat allowed them to reinvent themselves and make a come-back. What’s worse are the parties that have become so successful that they simply rot away internally. The most prominent example that comes to mind is the African National Congress (ANC), which came to power in 1994 as the “heroic” party of Nelson Mandela. Two presidents later, the ANC under Jacob Zuma became the party that gave us the term “state-capture.”

Like it or not, we’ve started seeing lots of “successful problems” in Singapore. In the business world, we had Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), which once collected over 80 percent of all spending on advertising in Singapore, having to reinvent itself as a property company, then having to spin-off the media business into a “non-profit” chaired by a former minister and the non-media business is the subject of a potential takeover battle.

How did this happen? The answer is pretty straight forward. SPH was so comfortable in its market leading position that it assumed that people would always read the Straits Times and advertisers would never have an alternative. The heads of SPH and MediaCorp used to enjoy arguing over whether readership or viewership was more important without realizing that people were not reading the Straits Times or viewing ChannelNews Asia and the advertisers noticed.

If you look closely enough, the problems at SPH are not isolated. Fact remains, the source of our “mandate of heaven” culture – notably the PAP lead government. Whilst the PAP has not seen anything resembling the “State Capture” under the ANC lead Zuma government in South Africa, it’s been showing a certain level of “tone-deafness” to the needs to the electorate.

This is particularly strange when you consider the fact that this is a year after an election that saw the PAP lose a further four seats (one GRC). Unlike the first time it lost a GRC in the 2011 election, the government seems to be getting less responsive to what the electorate is trying to say.

Covid-19 has amplified this. First you have the constant imposing and lifting of restrictions, which hurt retailers and restaurants. Then you have the Prime Minister’s wife taking to social media to tell her husband’s employers to “quit bitching.” The only time the government seems to have acted in the decisive manner has been in the introduction of the Protection of Online False Hoods Act (POFOMA) and the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act (FICA), which give the government an uncomfortable amount of power.

Then, after all that, we got the news that delegates at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum (NEF) would be allowed to dine in groups of five, whilst the rest of the nation was only allowed to dine in groups of two.

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/bloomberg-forum-nov-delegates-dine-in-groups-5-venues-singapore-054329036.html

 

The government said a lot about how hosting the Bloomberg NEF was a wonderful boost of confidence for Singapore’s economy. However, people thought otherwise and memes of Orwell’s Animal Farm “All Animals are Equal but Some are More Equal” started circulating. The response from the government was that the delegates of the NEF had to go through stricter testing measures than the Average Beng (Singapore’s Answer to the Average Joe.)

https://mothership.sg/2021/10/bloomberg-forum-gan-kim-yong/

 

Whilst that may be true, it was undoubtedly the wrong thing to say and demonstrates a lack of understanding of the electorate. If you sit in coffee shops (where most non-politicians gather) and trawl through cyberspace, there is one common complaint – namely the perception that there is a set of rules for those in power. This messaging confirmed that. I look back at an insolvency conference organized by Asian Legal Business (ALB, part of Thomson Reuters) in March of this year, when cases were significantly lower. We were not allowed to mingle between tables (which defeats the purpose of a networking event). The only difference between the ALB event in March and the upcoming NEF event is that the delegates are of a higher profile (global CEOs vs regional heads of law firms).

How tone deaf do you need to be to prove a negative perception correct? Former Worker’s Party Secretary General Low Thia Khiang once talked about having a co-driver to slap the driver when the driver sleeps. However, this is clearly a situation where the driver has been slapped but remains sleeping at the wheel. What can one do about that?

Are you a Yellow Ribbon Criminal? You have to be Judging by the Way You Speak and the Fact that You’re Working Here.

 One of my more prominent memories of working at Bruno’s came when I had to serve a group of mature ladies who decided that I was worth fliting with. I enjoyed being the centre of attention but the thing that struck me about that entire exchange was when one of the ladies asked “Are you a Yellow Ribbon Criminal?” When I asked what brought that on, her reply was that judging by the way I spoke, there seemed to be something wrong with the fact that I was working as service staff.

I like to think that she was paying me a compliment. However, the sentiments that were expressed, reflect an attitude that makes life a little harder for those of us who have either never made it or have “fallen.” This attitude isn’t particularly unique to Singapore but as I live here, I believe that this is an attitude that scares many people from being able to climb back up again in “face” conscious Asia.

This is something that will need to change on a social level for the simple reason that the old economic order which involved working for one company in one role until one retired in relative comfort is no longer there. Whilst this has been said for the last thirty-years, it’s become even more prominent. The trend of industries and roles dying overnight has only been exaggerated by Covid-19.

As with every period of rapid change, there are bound to plenty of people who fall through and we will need to find a way to help people get through the system. For high earners, particularly those over 45, will have to get used to the fact that they may never get a similarly high paying job should they lose it. What can they do about it? The government has been pushing “life-learning” and getting people to take on “second careers.”

However, this may not be the path for everyone and the current thrust of the government’s plans on life-long learning works on the premise that “careers” are like ladders – the only direction is up or down. Whilst the principle of encouraging “life-long learning” is right, there needs to be an understanding of the psychology of what happens to people when they fall. As I’ve mentioned in previous postings, I’ve known of people who held high end jobs, lost them and were unable to pick themselves up and reached the stage where they needed their bus cards topped up. Ask them to do a bit of “menial” work to put money in their pockets and they won’t do it. As is said – unlike the Western world where the issue is people trying to “game” a system designed to help the less fortunate, the problem in Singapore is that people are not willing to game the system.

So, perhaps the answer might be to change the approach to work and careers itself. A career path need not necessarily be just up and down. I think of a former boss who talked about the need to “widen” the pond instead of making it deeper. Whilst he was referring to a business, why can’t the same be true of an individual’s career.

In my early working life, just about everyone thought I was going to be a great “Public Relations” (PR) person. However, I couldn’t quite make it in the traditional “agency” system – never lasted for any agency more than a year. I did well on the PR projects that I worked on but somehow never lasted in a “working” environment.

So, I took the job in the restaurant to get a regular income. Interestingly enough, the restaurant was good for my PR skills. I actually did things like crisis management, dealing with irate customers (they ones who wanted to walk out without paying actually paid half) and dealt with troublesome staff (enough to the owner to give me the authority to fire the staff in question)

Ironically in my “third” progression, into the insolvency, the skills I have learnt in PR and were honed in the restaurant, would also come in useful, especially when one considers that the insolvency trade involves dealing with lots of irate people.

It took a while to look at my skills in a lateral manner. It also required understanding that I was the same person whether I was washing dishes or trying to get CEOs interviewed by the business press.

 

Believe it or not – the dude washing cups (Me at Bruno’s Serangoon)

 

 Is also the same person as this one (IIMPact 2013)

When I look at the official line on “second careers” and it works on the idea that a top man in one industry should go down to the ground and start a career at the bottom in another industry. It assumes that an engineer should he or she lose an engineer’s job should be willing to go back to school and say, start again as an intern in a bank.

Instead of looking at things that way, perhaps the answer might be to encourage employees to look at careers in a horizontal manner as well as in a vertical manner. As for employers, perhaps they should be encouraged to start looking at how someone who is cross trained can add value. I remember a friend of mine in the oil and gas industry rushed tried to get his HR team to hire my colleague when he found that she was a trained accountant from an engineering background. His point was that he found most normal accountants didn’t understand what was actually going on in the business because, well they only saw the business from spread sheets. That made this colleague of mine particularly interesting.

It is, as they say, time we get serious about reinventing jobs and the way we build careers.

 

Hey Bro – F** You Bro

 Whilst I may not always express it in my postings, I’m actually very blessed. One of my greatest blessings is being a “big-brother” to three amazing siblings. Although I am significantly older than my siblings (age difference being five, 14 and 17 years apart) and we’ve lived in different parts of the world for over two decades (I’m in Asia, two of them live in London and one lives in Chicago), I’m close enough to them to trust them with certain things that I wouldn’t others with. My siblings and I are protective of each other and I've understood my role as the "big brother" has being like the one in the photo below:

 

Being an older brother made me understood that the term “brother” goes beyond normal friendship. Being a "brother" is about sharing experiences and looking out for each other regardless of the inconveniences and material costs.  Outside my blood relatives, it's my army friends who were there for me during shitty times and are still there for me. With few notable exceptions, its not like that with the people I work for. The relationships in business are simple - once I am no longer of value, there will be no reason for them to be there for me when I'm down.

So, with this understanding of what it means to be a brother, I was rather perplexed by what our Minister of Manpower, Mr. Tan See Leng, meant when he talked about our "brother" migrant workers. Mr. Tan is an only child and I wondered if he really understood what it was to be a brother. Did he intend the term to imply he had brotherly concern for the workers? 

Well, there was a worker who didn't believe that Mr. Tan understood what it meant to be a brother and so, he offered to give Mr. Tan a tutorial in what it meant to be a brother. The tutorial is listed below:

https://theindependent.sg/migrant-worker-calls-out-tan-see-leng-for-slave-like-conditions-in-jurong-dorm-says-please-do-not-call-us-your-brothers/

 

Unfortunately, Mr. Zakir's tutorial was wasted on Mr. Tan. Let's just take a look at how Mr. Tan looked like when he decided to visit the workers in the dormitories after the mess that took place in the Westlite Dormitory in Jalan Tukang, some two weeks ago:

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/community/beds-set-aside-for-foreign-workers-recovering-from-covid-19-more-than-97-of

 

Seeing the brotherly concern that Mr. Tan and his Senior Minister of State, Dr. Koh Poh Koon showed the workers reminded me what my Dad sad to me at the end of my national service when I told him I had volunteered to go for a live firing exercise after a 155mm gun howitzer exploded and killed a friend of mine. I argued that the exercise would be fine because the colonel was going to fire first and we would be behind an armored vehicle. My Dad replied "If they felt it was that safe to fire the gun, why are they doing it from behind an armored vehicle?"

A version of my Dad's wisdom comes to mind here. Mr. Tan has talked about our "brother" migrant workers. Both Mr. Tan and his senior minister of state, Dr. Koh Poh Koon felt that despite what the dormitory owners were saying, that they would only be safe entering the premises in hazmat suits. How much more telling does it get.

Now, here's the question - what type of "brother" is Mr. Tan? Will he act like a brother to the workers now that he's made it clear that he knows that they live in places where he's only willing to enter if he's wearing a hazmat suit? 

Social Class or the Lack of It

 

When I first took on work as a waiter in 2012, one of the people I hung out with told me that I should ensure that I was not paid CPF because it would reflect badly on my work history. This friend of mine also got upset when I told him that I did do things like use newspaper to clean the class door and he said that it would upset my family that I, as a graduate Chinese, was doing menial task.

I bring up this conversation I had all those years ago because many people assume that because I had no qualms taking on a “menial” job in my late thirties, that I am not class or status conscious. As is often said, I clearly didn’t have the pride not to want to be seen doing “menial” things.

This impression about me is actually wrong. I am exceedingly class and status conscious. I actually believe that there are “high” class, “low” class and “no” class people in. I can’t say that I don’t get impressed by external factors like how someone is dressed (“Cosmetics count” as an uncle and former boss used to say), wealth (who doesn’t like being around the guys who have a “good” life) and education (who doesn’t like being around witty people), the biggest differentiator of class is in one’s behavior, particularly in how they treat those they perceive to be of a “lesser” social status.

I live in fear of being thought of as a “low life pariah.” So, I am extra conscious of being polite to the point of being meek whenever I speak to people like construction workers, street sweepers and maids. I believe that if I ever spoke like an “overlord” people around me would cringe in embarrassment of being in my company.  

 

He said it Best

One of the best impressions I had was of a former colleague. This colleague of mine is one of those chaps who is happily laid back and chilled out. His idea of “formal” dressing is a polo-t-shirt and he has no qualms about being known as “low-life-scum” (which he proudly told me was one of the email addresses he had). Yet, whenever I was around him, he was always polite. When we were served lunch at the client’s location, he made it a point to wash up (or in his words “don’t want them to think we’re animals”). His behavior was such that I understood him to be a high-class, well brought up person.

By comparison, I have met people who have everything that I don’t have like money, brains and hair. Yet, instead of feeling envy, I’ve been so repulsed by them that I’ve been praying for the opportunity to take a baseball bat to them and then to myself because I wouldn’t know how to clean of being contaminated by them. I meet a lot of such people in the liquidations industry. One of the very worst were a group of directors of a former listed construction company (the type that gets government contracts). Everyone in the group was well to do (the least paid was the finance manager on a small salary of $8,000 plus a month). Yet, they were repulsive and I cringed every time I was in their presence. You’re talking about guys who thought were pretty cool to be able to feed the 60 over construction workers they had not paid for several months and left on the construction site with no food, running water and a generator for electricity – which only had fuel for a few days by the time they went into provisional liquidation (and they only paid the said $600 because we advised them that they needed to get the workers off their payroll).

Working a “menial” job in my late thirties helped propel me into the leagues of the “class-sensitive.” I would notice that people who were nice to me but rather less so to my Pinoy or elderly colleagues, who were actually doing the same job as me.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a casual acceptance of what you’d call “pariah” behavior in Asia, especially if the pariah in question has a bit of money to throw around or comes from a prominent enough family. I remember an Italian colleague at the Bistrot getting the shock of her life when one of our customers, who happens to be from a wealthy enough family and a good friend of the Bistrot owner, slammed her class on the table in her direction. This girl’s sister used to think it was a point of generosity to invite the chef out to drink her left over wine. It was, as they say, acceptable behavior because she had money and came from a “good” family.

You could say that this is life. When dealing in business, you want the people with money to spend it with you, so you do what you need to do. However, that doesn’t mean that such pariahs need to be respected as anything more once they are of no use to the people who know how to speak human to each other.

How Much is this Going to Cost?

 Around a month ago, I got hit with a nasty gout attack that sent me to hospital. The pain was so bad that I was bed ridden to two-days and I needed to call an ambulance in order to get me to hospital. As it turned out, the hospital had a wonderful way of getting my mind of the excruciating pain – they told me that I needed to spend the night in hospital and the mind shifted away from the pain to “Oh God, how much is this going to cost me?” The focus went straight to ensuring that whatever ward the hospital placed me in, it would “NOT” be the exclusive one.

The truth is that health care in Singapore is exceedingly expensive. Even with government subsidies, one needs to consider every visit to the doctor carefully because chances the visit will set one back. I take myself as an example. Even when I had a corporate job that covered out patient costs, I made it a point to go to the polyclinics whenever I needed medical attention. The reason was and remains simple – polyclinics come with a government subsidy and although I’m all for supporting SME operations, taking the government subsidy is the only way I’ll be able to afford to get myself treated.

Unfortunately, healthcare is not the only thing that is expensive in Singapore. Houses and cars for example are a racket. I think of the shock that American relatives had when I told them that a million dollars was government subsidized housing. A million in America outside Beverly Hills and downtown Manhattan is a mansion. As for cars, we are probably the only place on the planet where one has to buy a piece of permission to buy a car (excluding import duties and so on), which costs as much as the car itself.

Houses and cars are just the tip of the ice berg. The Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPPL) and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) conducted a study that found that a couple of with a teenager and pre-teen, need a household income of $6,426 a month:

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/family-of-four-needs-6426-a-month-for-basic-standard-of-living-in-spore-says

 

A sample of the costs of living in Singapore can be found at:

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Singapore

 

It’s no secret that the costs of living in Singapore are high. According to the 2020 World Economic Forum report, Singapore is the 14^th most expensive city in the world, ahead of famously expensive cities like New York and Osaka.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/world-most-expensive-cities-covid-paris-zurich-singapore/

 

In a way, the high cost of living in Singapore should not come as a surprise. We are a regional financial centre of a growing economic region. We are a small, crowded and prosperous place. So, it does without saying that things are going to be expensive.

However, the real issue is not so much that the city is expensive. The real issue, as stated in the Straits Times article is the fact that 30 percent of working households in Singapore cannot afford it. That’s just the lot that can’t afford it. The study doesn’t mention those who are “just getting by” nor does it go into detail as what people have to do to get by. The problem is not so much that Singapore is not expensive but whether Singapore is too expensive for Singaporeans. Monaco is famously expensive but its residents aren’t struggling to make ends meet.

Given Singapore has reached the stage of being famously expensive, one then has to ask how is it such that the government has been famously resistant to implementing a “minimum wage” and only recently took the position that firms would need to hire Singaporeans on no less than $1,400 a month. If you look at the numero.com report, it states that a single person in Singapore would need $1,338.16 without paying rent just to survive. This turn would mean that a low wage earning, with a minimum salary of $1,400 (before the 20 percent employee deduction) would not be able to meet the minimum cost of survival in Singapore.

So, what can be done? The usual refrain from the government is that it is moving away from its “non-welfarism” roots and subsidizing basic costs for things like housing. However, whilst there are times when subsidies may be necessary, that doesn’t come to the root of the issue. As Chinese medicine practitioners are prone to tell us – we need to treat the cause rather than the symptoms of the problem.

Let’s look at our wage structure. How can lower wage workers keep enough of his or her salary to survive and at the same time prepare for the future? Or, if one cannot earn a certain sum from one employer, what are the other avenues that one can take to earn extra. These are the questions that the authorities need to ask if the authorities want to ensure that Singapore does not become too expensive for Singaporeans.

"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.

Crazily Entertaining Creepy A***holes

 

If you want to do a study of Singapore, you could do no worse than to read the “White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga. This book irritates the hell out of my expat Indian friends because he gives the “shinning India” that former Indian Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee a “good dressing down” in a very sarcastic manner. The novel’s main character talks about India being divided into the “light” and the “darkness” and divides the caste system into “men with bellies” and “men without bellies.”

As much as my Singaporean friends would hate to admit, what the White Tiger describes of India, also applies to Singapore when it comes to the area of foreign worker relations. If you look at the industries involving foreign labour, there is inevitably the “light” and “dark” Singapore. Talking about light and darkness in these industries has racial undertones in as much as the people living in the “light” are inevitably Chinese and thus fair skinned and the people living in the “dark” are usually South Asians, who are inevitably a darker shade of pink.

The differences between the light and dark in these industries is more than skin deep. The people in the light inevitably live comfortable lives, whilst the lives of the people in the dark, is well, pretty dark.

Covid-19 made this very clear. The thing that caused our first major outbreak that led to the initial circuit breaker in April 2020 came from an outbreak in the worker dormitories, which is filled with people who live in the darkness. It shouldn’t have surprised anyone because, foreign workers had died of other diseases due to unsanitary living conditions and a virus that thrives on close human contact found a very fertile breading ground in the worker dormitories. The then Minister for Manpower, Ms. Josephine Teo had the unenviable task of admitting that the worker dormitories were unsatisfactory and a government that made so much about doing the right thing rather than the easy thing was also forced to admit that they had held back on pushing the construction industry to upgrade conditions for workers because the industry would squeal about the rising costs.

At the onset of the outbreak, the government stepped in and agreed to share the costs in helping the dormitory operators get their facilities up to a livable standard. Personally, I thought this was offensive. The “dormitory” business is highly profitable, doesn’t create anything of great value or create high paying jobs for Singaporeans so there’s no logical or moral reason for the tax payer to subsidize them for providing the basics to their customers. Singapore takes great pride in being “non-welfare,” especially when it comes to lower income people asking for a few cents more. I took issue with this and got a letter published in the Straits Times Forum (Singapore’s flagship daily) questioning why companies like Centurion Corporation, which made S$103 million in profit on revenue of $133 million should receive money from the tax payer. My letter can be found at:

https://www.straitstimes.com/forum/forum-let-dormitory-operators-face-the-music-themselves

Mr. Koh Chee Min, the CEO of Centurion Corporation thought I was worthy enough of a reply and set out to set me straight on my “mistaken beliefs” about how dormitory operator’s function. He accepted that standards had to be raised in view of Covid and assured the public in his letter that he was glad that we had discovered concern for migrant workers. His letter can be found at:

https://www.straitstimes.com/forum/forum-worker-dorms-have-recreational-facilities-programmes-for-community-living

You could argue that mistakes were bound to happen in the initial stages of the pandemic. It was unique situation and the government had its reasons for stepping in to help the dormitory operators to bring their buildings up to scratch. You would also have assumed that the government and the operators would have worked some form of contingency planning.

Let’s be clear, the Singapore government is known around the world for being far sighted. Our government is known for planning for every possible scenario.

Yet, more than one year after the tax payer was forced to bail out a highly profitable industry, the issues have clearly not been solved. This was made clear when riot police had to be called in to deal with workers in the Westlite Jalan Tukang Dormitory who had the audacity to be unhappy about their living conditions (contrary to popular belief, people who are forced to live in disease causing conditions are bound to get upset and you cannot argue that the people making others live in such conditions are the victims). The story can be found at:

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/workers-at-jurong-dorm-allege-neglect-frustrated-with-lack-of-medical-care-for

 

He sleeps here in a pandemic

So, here’s the question – if the tax payer had to step into subsidise the dormitory owners in an extraordinary time, why was it such that this incident happened? The only response that the employer (SembCorp Marine) and the dormitory operator (Westlite, which is owned by Centurion Corporation) have offered an apology of sorts and mentioned something about conducting regular testing.

However, why is there even a need for an apology. The incident should never have happened in the first place. Unlike last year, we know more about Covid and its clear that protocols should have been put into place. They clearly were not and I’ve argued in public that this is not how things should be, as expressed in my letter which was published by the Straits Times:

https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/forum/forum-more-can-still-be-done-to-manage-covid-19-situation-in-foreign-worker-dorms

 

Tax payer money was used to ensure that the dormitories would not be an issue in the fight against Covid. Yet this has not been the case. Hopefully the tax payer did not have to help sustain the lifestyle of Mr. Koh’s boss’s wife:

https://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/home-design/party-in-season

 

So, she can continue living here:

It should be noted that Centurion Corporation’s financial figures have remained very healthy. While they have dipped a little (which business hasn’t in these times), the shareholders have no reason to be unhappy with what’s being delivered:

https://centurion.listedcompany.com/financials.html

 

Covid-19 has caused a lot of misery around the world. However, it has caused many of us to relook at social contracts. Why should the highly profitable receive tax payer subsidies to provide the service that they’re selling? Shouldn’t people who take public money be held accountable to the public?  

Cheaply Employed Cheating A***oles

 

I’ve avoided talking about doing business with India and Indians in my blog because it’s a highly emotive topic that can spin out of control. My experiences when dealing with Singapore’s complex communal relations are not the ordinary. If you look at certain segment of Singapore’s cyberspace, you’re bound to get the impression that the Indians from India are a group of devious crooks with fake qualifications, looking to displace Singaporeans and to screw them in the process. This has not been my personal experience with the Indian expat community. This was the community that gave an unknown freelancer with no “big agency” experience chances that would otherwise be unimaginable. It will, forever be stuck in my memory that on the one occasion I, as an individual, was allowed to pitch for a government related job was because of an Indian born member of the board of that particular agency fought for me, while the born, bread and prospered Singaporeans dismissed me as “THAT BLOGGER.”

Never the less, I do work to see it from the side of the guys who have had different experiences with our new migrants from the less developed world. Yes, it cannot be easy to slog for a degree and then get rejected from jobs that you believe to be yours and everyone you meet in the HR department happens to be from a particular community.

So, I avoided getting involved in the discussion on the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement or “CECA” for those reasons. However, a few days back, I got involved with a discussion with a couple of friends about India and in that discussion, someone mentioned words of the effect of how people enjoying a good life in India was due to the fact that Singapore was providing it. That got me thinking – are we really that unaware of our geopolitical reality?

If you look at the basics, there’s a lot to commend about Singapore. We’re rich, clean and green. Singapore is safe. Unless you’re exceedingly unlucky and end up on the receiving end of a random psychopath, nothing bad is likely to happen to you. Our relatively rapid rise up the prosperity ladder gave Lee Kuan Yew a second career as the world’s consultant on nation building.

While Singapore and to be fair, the late Mr. Lee got many things right, we need to remember that we are still a very small dot on the scale of things and when it comes to the negotiating table, we actually have very few cards to play with. We’ve gotten this far by playing the few cards we’ve had quite well but fact remains – things are not necessarily in our favour.

This becomes clear when you talk about CECA and our relationship with India. Could we have negotiated a better deal? Sure, we could have, as they always are in hindsight. However, we need to look at how we negotiated given our position.

I know many will argue that India and Indians across the social spectrum (from Bank CEO to construction worker) earn “good” money in Singapore, which they probably would not have earnt back in India. It is also true that Singapore is India’s largest foreign direct investor, having invested some US$15 billion from April to December 2020 and accounting for nearly a third of foreign direct inflows into India as is outlined by the following report:

https://www.india-briefing.com/news/india-reports-us81-72-billion-in-fdi-in-fy21-top-trends-22366.html/

While this may be true, one should not get the impression that India would collapse if Singapore were to remove its investments in India and to stop all Indians in Singapore from remitting money back to India. Sure, many people in India would be less comfortable or may even starve to death. However, if you were to look the larger picture, Foreign Investment actually plays a negligible in India’s overall economy (in 2019 FDI inflows made up 1.8 percent of GDP). By comparison, foreign investment is an integral part of Singapore’s overall economy making up 32 percent of total GDP.

While India has been “waking up” to the value of attracting foreign investment, the Indian economy has been driven primarily on its large domestic market. Singapore by contrast has no viable domestic market to speak of and needs inflows of foreign investment to keep going.

As the following diagram shows, our largest source of inward investment remains Western, specifically Europe and the USA.

https://www.singstat.gov.sg/find-data/search-by-theme/trade-and-investment/foreign-direct-investment/visualising-data/foreign-direct-investment-in-singapore-dashboard

 

However, as Donald Trump made very clear, one cannot expect the Western World to guarantee our economic or military security. A small nation like Singapore needs all the friends that it can get.

Then, add to the fact that the newest “geopolitical” bully is China, which has become more “assertive” under President Xi. Given that China is a billion-person market and an increasingly prosperous one, its negotiating position at the geopolitical one is strong (though one can argue that they will make mistakes and overreach).

So, given that our “traditional” friends are unlikely to want to cross swords with China over us in any given hypothetical scenario, we do need to cultivate more friends.

Incidentally, the only nation that has the “mass” to match China is India. Former Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbot has said as much:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/india-the-sensible-substitute-for-belligerent-beijing/news-story/2d7940c990e38bb4c4574c38c2c45e79

 

The rough patch in China-Western relations has been a boon for India. If we were to ever pull out of India, the major players on the global stage would step in. While Narendra Modi may have attended Lee Kuan Yew’s funeral, he was also becoming best friends with then Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe.

In crudest terms, we actually need India more than India actually needs us. There are undoubtedly massive problems with and within India, which have only been amplified by Covid. The majority of Indians live in dreadful poverty, there are security issues, environmental issues and so on. However, India remains the most viable option to China and, especially in the last two years increasingly a place that businesses have to be in.

So, what exactly can we offer? Like the Virgin Group, our most promising asset is actually our “brand.” I know of an Indian born entrepreneur, who stated that being known as a “Singapore Company” allowed him to charge more than if he was an “Indian” Company.

Singapore may no longer be “cost-competitive” but we do have a reputation for being reliable and for doing good enough work for the international market. This makes us attractive to the world’s brains. If you think about it, it is a good thing that people want to come here.

Ironically, this is probably our only “real” card in negotiations with admittedly less developed but bigger countries like India. We need to show the world that things like rule of law matter. We need to show that we treat entrepreneurs fairly. Singapore may not have many cards to play but we need to continue playing the few that we have well.

Ultimately, It’s About Culture

 Saw a letter in the Straits Times Forum at this start of the month, which came from a school teacher who argued that having smaller class sizes helped to foster “innovative” thinking. The forum letter can be found at:

https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/forum/forum-smaller-class-sizes-foster-independent-thinking

She’s right. It easier to generate and encourage discussion with a smaller group. Universities, for example work on the principle that you have lectures, which is a time to listen to a learned professor drone on about something or other. Then you have your seminars, which are smaller group discussions and supposed to be where you do your real learning (at Goldsmiths in the late 1990s, you had to attend a minimum number of seminars to graduate but nobody cared about your attendance at lectures). Churches work on a similar system – there is the sermon and then the private sessions.

 

You’re more like to be open up here:

 

Than here.  

In Asia, where “face” is an integral part of culture and the message of how the needs and rights of the individual are always secondary to that of a group, you’ll find that people are highly reluctant to stand out and express themselves. Government press conferences in Singapore, are the perfect example of this. Unlike the mad scramble of the White House press briefing room, our press conferences are inevitably quiet. It takes a while for reporters to ask questions and the people conducting the press conference don’t actually like questions.

The one personal example that comes to mind is back in 2006 when, during the visit of the late Saudi Crown Prince Sultan, who was giving the Singapore Lecture. I was asked to brief the Saudi corp-comms team. Told them that in the post 9-11 world, they had to be prepared for “awkward” questions about terrorism and the price of oil, but then I assured them they would have a totally different problem – a lack of questions. Interestingly enough, I was proved right. The Crown Prince delivered his lecture. The Chairman, who was then Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong, opened the floor to a single “NON-TIME-WASTING” question.

This incident highlights one of the undiscussed aspects of fostering independent thinking that’s often left out of the discussion – namely culture. The size of the group or the discussion is irrelevant if it happens in a place where the culture does not encourage independent thought.

That particular Singapore lecture was a perfect example. It was actually accepted that a government official could declare the nature of questions asked at a public event where media would be present. As with the word “responsible,” who is to decide on what constituted “time-wasting.”

When you work in a system where the man speaking is the person with power over your livelihood and shown a willingness to use that power – you learn to tread very carefully. Our first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew was clear that the media would serve his agenda rather than the other way round. There were no defined “OB” markers as in places like Saudi Arabia (don’t touch Islam or Royalty) or Malaysia (No Bumiputra Issues) and so editors learnt to er of the side of caution. Rewards for “independence” were not rewarded and “complying” meant a safe and comfortable life. I think of veteran journalist, Clement Mesenas who led the last journalist strike in 1971. He once stated that the success of the strike was in a way the downfall of independent journalism – the government saw to it that journalists were paid well and it was not in their interest to “rock the boat.”

A look back at another press event where I was invited to. Our then Minister of Communications, Dr. Lee Boon Yang (who is interestingly enough Chairman of Singapore Press Holdings) gave a prepared speech. Then, Carl Bildt, former Swedish Prime Minister delivered his speech. Even the Ministry of Communications had to admit that the Swedish Minister simply outshone ours. The reason is simple, our minister operates in an environment where he arrives at events and tells people what to do. The Swedish minister operates in an environment where he is constantly judged and has to answer questions. Carl Bildt is comfortable being open in public with people who question and think differently. Dr. Lee is not.

It’s this simple. If you want to really foster independent thinking, you have to ensure that there is a culture that does not punish people who raise questions. You need a system where those in authority are comfortable with having a dialogue rather than giving dictation. The size of your classes will not matter as long as the culture does not permit discussion and independent thought.