THE TEMASEK REVIEW

OPINION

During a speech made at the fifth Asia Economic Summit two days ago, Singapore deputy prime minister Wong Kan Seng said that good governance and strong leadership are the critical elements which underpins how the Singapore government steers its future forward.

According to Mr Wong, the Singapore government has distilled a set of principles on governance and leadership to guide its decision and policy-making over the years.

He listed five principles that the island republic applied successfully to run the city-state, namely, “Good, Clean Governance”, “Integrity and Meritocracy”, “Anticipate Change and Stay Relevant”, “Do What is Right, Not What is Popular” and the final one is “Leadership is Key.”

There was no mention about the collective will and rights of the people. What if the people do not agree with the government? Will it still go ahead and do what it thinks it is right? And how can we be sure that it is right all the time?

Mr Wong’s views encapsulate the mindset of the PAP which has promulgated a patriarchal if not autocratic form of government during its reign for the last fifty years – that the (economic) welfare of the people takes precedent over their political rights.

In the 1986 National Day rally, then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew said of his priorities in nation-building:

“What are our priorities? First, the welfare, the survival of the people. Then, democratic norms and processes which from time to time we have to suspend.”

The misperception that democracy is not compatible with good governance was perpetuated over time by the state media leading to a gradual numbing of the political consciousness of the citizenry which has grown to be completely clueless about their political rights as citizens.

Lee was to lecture a Japanese audience in Tokyo 6 years later that “Western” values of freedoms and liberties of the individual are not relevant to Asian societies:

“With few exceptions, democracy has not brought good government to new developing countries…What Asians value may not necessarily be what Americans or Europeans value. Westerners value the freedoms and liberties of the individual. As an Asian of Chinese cultural backround, my values are for a government which is honest, effective and efficient.”

He was soon proven wrong a few years later when South Koreans voted for a democrat Kim Dae Jung to be its president and Taiwan made the final transition from a one-party state to a two-party system when Chen Shui Bian from the opposition Democratic Progressive Party won the presidency.

In 2004, Indonesia held its first free presidential elections which saw a former general Susilo Bambang-Yudhyono winning it and ushering a series of democratic reforms into the nation’s political system. Malaysia’s ruling Barisan Nasional coalition was denied its traditional two-thirds majority in the 2008 elections and just this year in Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party was voted out of office after more than fifty years.

As the above examples have shown clearly, “democracy” isn’t a western value, but a universal one which is critical to good governance and strong leadership of every nation.

Democracy is not an ideal form of government, but it is the least of all evils because it allows the people to partake actively in the political life of their nation, to have their opinions heard and reflected in the policy-making process and more importantly, to enable a diversity of views from across the political spectrum to be expressed within the constitutional set-up of the nation which facilitates sharing and orderly transfer of power from one group to another.

An aware, alert and active citizenry, supported by a free press, a robust civil society and an independent judiciary is the cornerstone of “good, clean” governance.

The government deliberates and decides on policies which will affect countless of people who are therefore in the best position to assess its performance.

What a government thinks is good for the nation may not be shared by its citizens. A government which does not listen to the people will tend to make mistakes with disastrous consequences for future generations.

For example, the government introduced the “Stop at two” policy in the 1970s to decrease the ballooning population of Singapore. It faced opposition from Singaporeans who were keen to have larger families back then, but was able to push the unpopular policy through because the people had no power to resist it and neither was there an opposition in parliament to force the ruling party into a debate on the issue.

Families who had more than two children were fined and denied education subsidies for the third child. Women with little education were encouraged not to have children and to get themselves sterilized.

The policy was implemented rather hastily and its spectacular success turned out to be a catastrophe now that our fertility rate has dropped below the replacement level and we have to import large number of foreigners to boost Singapore’s population thereby creating another set of problem altogether.

Had the government taken a step back then, solicited more feedback from the people and studied the long-term implications in detail, it might have tweaked the policy to avert the situation we find ourselves in today.

In the same speech, Mr Wong said that Singapore had also been consistently ranked among the top five least corrupt nations the past few years, and the scores in the survey were the result of a systematic effort by the government over the past 50 years, to weed out corruption.

While the efforts of the Singapore government to tackle corruption deserved to be praised, it is achieved largely because its founding leaders are honest, clean and incorruptible themselves rather than the strength of the Singapore political system itself.

When the father is in the house, every child will be quiet and obedient but the moment he leaves, all hell will break loose.

Human nature is unpredictable. Greed is inherent in every man and woman. The best bulwark against corruption is to have an institutionalized system of checks and balance in place to detect, expose and punish corrupted leaders and civil servants. It cannot be based solely on trust alone, as according to Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugarathan.

It is highly worrying that there is no opposition in parliament to hold the ruling party accountable, no free and independent media which dares to publish the wrong-doings of government leaders and no civil society to keep the people abreast of the current affairs of the nation.

The Singapore opposition is perenially weak, divided and ineffectual. There is only one print media company in Singapore which is controlled by the ruling party. All the grassroots organizations are under the charge of the Prime Minister who is the Chairman of the People’s Association and the Home Affairs Minister has the power to shut down any NGOs deemed “detrimental” to the nation’s interest.

Furthermore, the independence of the Singapore judiciary has been questioned by the esteemed International Bar Association Human Rights Institute and the economy of the nation is dominated by major state-linked companies owned indirectly by the government via its two sovereign wealth funds.

The over-concentration of power in the hands of a few in Singapore is a ticking time bomb. So long as its leaders are decent, honest and well-meaning individuals, Singapore will be able to practice “good governance” backed by “strong leadership” because it will be a breeze running a country when everybody sings to its tune including the subdued “opposition” in parliament.

What if a scheming, unscrupulous and dishonest leader is allowed to slip through into the establishment undetected in the future after our senior leaders have left the political stage? Who is going to expose him/her from power when he/she potentially controls every single institution of the country?

Until Mr Wong or the Prime Minister answers this crucial question, nobody can guarantee for sure that Singapore will continue to enjoy years of good governance in the next few decades.

Singapore’s archaic one-party system is grossly incompatible with its exalted status as a first-world economy. We are a long way off from building a system with clear separation of powers between the executive and the legislative as well as independent institutions outside the government which can check on possible abuses of power.

Absolute power may lead to good governance and strong leadership temporarily, but it will also corrupt absolutely in the absence of democratic principles and practices.

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