The Serangoon Road Conundrum

A stormy riot, on an equally rain-soaked Sunday night along a routinely bustling strip of Singapore’s Little India, has captured the world’s attention.  The trigger, a purportedly drunken foreign worker of Indian descent was mowed over by a bus ferrying other workers back to their dormitory.  What sparked the violent scenes of vehicle pelting and assaults requires answers that possibly no inquiry can ever fully surface.

Was this an alcohol-induced incident, fueled by a rowdy mob packed within a two km stretch of road enveloped by ethnic shops, restaurants and temples? Anyone who has taken a stroll down Serangoon road on any given Sunday evening would witness a scene of collective drinking along pathways and on any available patch of grass. As pointed out by Alex Au of Yawning Bread, “at their low wages, they can’t afford to spend their leisure time in commercial establishments like cafes and restaurant”. Alex also offers an interesting treatise on how a confluence of spatial features and bad weather provided the ideal backdrop for the eruption of violence.

Explaining how usually rational individual behave during an irrational situation is too broad and complex to discuss definitively. I would like to however touch on a divisive subject that was alluded to in discussions on social media, and featured prominently in Alex’s aforementioned blog post; the role of disruptive policing (termed ‘active’ policing by Alex) and the perception of authorities manifested in first responders.

Anyone who was once a self-respecting pubescent teenager would recount at some point in their life running into the scope of a patrolling police officer. Be it loitering at a void deck late at night, or sneaking that illegal cigarette in a public playground. To some this is a rare occurrence, but to others that perhaps fit a deeply engraved profile of a typical troublemaker (you know who you are), this tends to happen more often than not.

Alex shares that such active or disruptive policing happens regularly “in the void decks and alleyways of Little India, freely issuing summonses and intrusively asking for identification. Workers see this as harassment. It is the exact opposite of what it takes to build trust between the police and communities”.

Now is this generally a bad thing?  Disruptive policing is a key component of the law-enforcement strategy modeled under Intelligence-Led Policing. In a sentence, this technique seeks to utilize the crime deterrent effect generated by a highly visible, regular and tangible police presence, to reduce crime in an identified crime hot area.

To illustrate its application, a scenario could be an increase of crime in a neighbourhood littered with street walkers and drug dealers. Active and visible police cars patrolling the streets could possibly deter the would-be clients from loitering in the vicinity, resulting in a decrease in the attractiveness of the area for crime.  Drawing back to the situation along Little India, perhaps the right type of disruptive policing would involve the visible presence of a credible deterrent, in the form of regular police officers and not auxiliary officers and the token NS-men or two.

The conduct of these additional patrols is as important as their numbers. Unlike the example of street walkers and soliciting clients, the purpose is not to displace our South Asian temporary residents. Our boys in blue have to be seen as being equally interested in maintaining a conducive and safe space for Singaporeans and Foreigners alike. This is the real challenge.

There are two events that suggest this animosity between our South Asian workers and enforcement authorities are, for lack of a better word, strained. Symbolically, the flipping and torching of police vehicles and ambulances offers a clear target of frustrations. Did they believe the first responders were arrived to assist their pinned compatriot, or were they there to merely engage in crowd control and to sweep the incident into non-existence? Perhaps there are other anecdotal incidents that fuels this perception.

The other (non) event is the conspicuous lack of acts of looting. Looting often goes hand-in-hand with spontaneous riots.  Flash back to the August 2011 London riots, much of the incidents coincided with opportunistic looting of mobile phone shops, restaurants and other retailers along the British High Streets. Similarly to what I read now, commentary back then pinned the blame on a disenfranchised minority group that were concentrated in areas of relatively high deprivation.

Now taking these two points together, it becomes harder to accept the online speculation that the ‘real’ reasons for the riots were the manifestation of the traditional class-divide tension rooted in poverty, employment frustrations, and general over-crowding.  As commenters now claim that attempts at painting the event as alcohol-driven is merely engaging in scapegoating, it would over-generalising to suggested a micro event was fuelled primarily by marco socio-spatial factors; without any empirical proof of course.  

To conclude, from a purely speculative assessment, understanding the interaction/relationship between our foreign workers and the people that share their spaces is a more important priority than let’s say a re-look at our immigration policy. Otherwise it seems counterintuitive to claim to be concerned for the welfare of this sub-group, and at the same time be knee-jerked into proposing solutions that only seek to limit their opportunities to make a decent living for themselves.

Yahoo News is the balance?

The major alternative news source in Singapore, Yahoo News, will comply with new MDA regulations and apply for accreditation while a group of bloggers continue to make their dissatisfaction known.

Peeling away the layers, it is obvious that the new regulations were enacted to have some sort of control over Yahoo. But it seems Yahoo is not resisting, at least not publicly. It has more than 1 million visitors a day, its news coverage is saucy and different from what is covered by the mainstream media. Readers like their approach (good mix of hard and soft news) and know that they can find alternative viewpoints at Yahoo.

If you want to hear more opposition views during GE or By-E, go to Yahoo. If you want to know what WP say about the town council saga, go to Yahoo. Latest about the Cherian George's tenure rejection, don't bother asking Mr George, go to Yahoo. It's free, it's easily accessible and it's an different read.And it irks the PAP.

Though, Yahoo wouldn't be too pleased to sign away their rights, they're glad that bloggers are making noise on the sidelines and they are happy to feature them. On Yahoo's part, they would just have to abide, appear cooperative to the government and continue to generate advertising revenue.

Sometimes, punters would say TRS, Temasek Times or even the forums are the balance to state-controlled media. But they are not. They are only fringe actors. They represent the constant 15% that would vote for any guy not wearing white on white. Most Singaporeans read them with a high sodium diet. And the government wouldn't shut these down, else they might not know where to look for them.

Still lesser Singaporeans read TOC and Public House. They are a good read with worthy ideas to contemplate, but not many will find them fitting in the materialistic cosmos of Singapore. 

The shifting middle of the road Singaporeans, many of them eventually voting WP, read and analyse mainstream media together with alternative sources like Yahoo and international media. And as long as Yahoo can generate readership, stay profitable, there is not much the government can do except asking them for “registration” and make them remove clearly defamatory comments. Legal action on such a popular website will only stir the hornet's nest.

The search for alternative news, views and politics in Singapore will continue. A gladiator arena is no spectator sport with just one dominant actor. What is unfortunate for Singapore is, the main opposition, WP, does not have a clear online agenda and the main alternative online news portal, Yahoo, is a form of neo-imperialism American corporate power.

From Drumsticks to Chickens

The dust has settled somewhat on the Population White Paper.  It is perhaps time to really examine this document especially in light of the on-going Budget debate because, fundamentally, the key tenet of this Population White Paper is whether the Government can deliver on the accompanying infrastructure development plan to buffer the impact of a rise in population numbers.

 

The fact that the White Paper has become one of the most contentious issues since post-independence Singapore can be traced to the fact that the average Singaporean has developed an irrational xenophobia which has been deeply accentuated by a real lack of space in Singapore.  So it could have been 6.9 million, 6 million or any other arbitrary figure, this xenophobia will continue to persist so long as infrastructure development does not keep pace with population increase.  Public sentiment on this issue has evolved into an irrational, sensitive and hence, unpredictable psyche among Singaporeans.

The key then is to alter the daily reality for Singaporeans, in the words of the White Paper, to give the people a “good quality living environment”.

Imagine a Singapore where the trains run smoothly with multiple redundant lines to ease congestion and where a young couple seeking to start a family is able to afford high quality public housing options without being saddled by crippling loans.

The sad reality is that such a Singapore could have existed today if not for the myopia of our economic planners. 

A former senior Government bureaucrat, Donald Low, had in his post-2011 GE analysis revealed that, “MOF routinely turned down requests from MOT and LTA to finance new rail lines”.  There are other pointed revelations in his thesis which suggest that perhaps, the crux of this Population White Paper for 2030 rests primarily on our Government’s money men to overcome their tendency to run Singapore like a giant profit-driven MNC and to stop equating Singapore’s growth purely in terms of dollars and cents. 

It can be argued that it is this profit-minded mind-set of our fiscal planners which has basically eroded the carefully built-up trust or social compact between Singaporeans and the Government.  Nowadays, it is a commonly held perception that this Government may give you one dollar through market subsidies or other cleverly disguised cash hand-outs, but at the same breath, devise even more clever schemes to take back two dollars; the ERP and COE policies are prime examples of such puzzling fiscal earning schemes which irk Singaporeans tremendously. As one of my friends wryly remarks in colourful Hokkien, “they give you a drumstick but take back a chicken”.

The greatest irony is perhaps that these civil servants from the Ministry of Finance, so tight-fisted with public expenditure that can help Singaporeans, are strangely very generous and have no qualms whatsoever to provide a mind-boggling $4 billion loan of our taxpayer money to a reviled international organisation like the IMF.  In this now forgotten episode which happened last year, I truly applaud Mr Kenneth Jeyaretnam for having the courage to doggedly challenge our DPM and Finance Minister, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, on the legal constitutionality of this loan.

 

The Population White Paper, in the end, is just a piece of paper with numbers and words.  The test is not in the White Paper.  The test is in the resolve and will of the Government to fully fund the implicit infrastructural development plan required to accommodate 6.9 million people by 2030 without worrying about imagined investment returns or financial risk and to stop devising cunningly disguised plans to claw even more money from us, the true Singaporeans, to pay for this new infrastructure plan.

The test for the next 17 years is to grow in a manner that does not feel like what Singaporeans have painfully experienced in the past decade or so.  To match that desire for growth among Singaporeans that is not measured on statistical investment returns but on emotive intangible returns like quality of life and happiness indices. 

In short, the Government has to gain back the trust that Singaporeans used to have in our public institutions through development policies which have the Singaporean at its core.  If not, the political price the Government has paid thus far over this issue will be pittance once the anger in the Singaporean core evolves into flames that will not subside.

GE2011: The Aljunied Conundrum

GE 2011 kicked off with much fanfare and excitement built on a more vocal opposition that deployed social media to successfully increase their collective profile. From A-teams to suicide teams, star candidates to secret weapons, the voting population certainly seems spoilt for choice when it comes to opposition candidates to choose from.

Having myself attended the WP rally at Hougang on 28 April, I found myself swept by the euphoria of the massive crowd made up of die-hard Hougang supporters and rally groupies of all walks, shape and colour. I left Hougang that night with a spring in my step and warm feeling that one can only experience when expecting a life transforming change.

Then I read the papers article the next morning on George Yeo’s comment that the “WP was forcing Aljunied residents to pick between self-interest and pushing the Opposition cause”.

My knee jerk response was to brush this statement off as a sign of the PAP feeling jittery about their chances in defending Aljunied GRC and were thus resorting to a tried and tested use of the mainstream media to cast doubt over the Oppositions’ chances.

But as I reflected over my own motivations behind my voting decision, the good feeling vibes of that rally night wore off. Subsequent decisions with friends over how they intended to vote killed off any remaining vibe I had. And here is why.


Self-interest vs Opposition Causes?

All of my friends sung the same tune when it came to the rising cost of living, influx of foreigners, affordability of HDBs … etc. But when it came to making a decision on the voting day, here is where the choir started to sing off tune.

While we all agreed that changes needed to happen, it seemed that for some, though they wanted a better government, they actually just wanted a better PAP.

When it came to macro-level policies, they drew a distinction between Ministers and Member of Parliaments. The former being responsible for national issues, while the latter, in charge of municipal matters.

So what happened to their support of the Opposition I wondered? My feeling is that they would like more Opposition members to be in Parliament to ever to often ruffle the feathers of the decision makers, but when it comes to choosing their MP, they would still prefer a PAP member. A good example of this thought process was WP’s Yaw Shin Leong who declared he voted for the PAP when face with a choice between a PAP candidate and an SDP candidate for his ward in 2006.

So back to why George Yeo’s statement affected me so. Was the WP burdening the Aljunied constituents to maintain any semblance of Oppositional representation?

The WP team in Aljunied certainly looks the most impressive with Low Thia Khiang, Sylvia Lim and Chen Show Mao. However, with the WP’s stand that they will not accept the NCMP slots, certainly all their best eggs are in one single basket. From the point of view of an Aljunied constituent, one would surely be aware that the whole of Singapore is watching closely.

They can’t get away with saying: “I voted PAP because the Opposition rep they sent was lousy, or too young, or too inexperienced, or too radical….etc”, because from my stand point, it is as good as it gets.


Prediction: 7 May 2011

My sober prediction for GE 2011 is that the PAP might end up with 55.5% of the valid votes and 85 out of the 87 seats.

The improved showing for the opposition is a mark of how far they as a collective have come since 2006. But even with an improved performance, the status quo is maintained.

It boils back to the psyche of the everyday voter that is concerned about is immediate environment. Are there enough buses through my estate, is the estate clean, are there new facilities to revitalize my neighbourhood, are there developments that have helped raise the value of my property and so on.

While it is romantic to think about the struggling Hougang-ers and Potong Pasir-ers leading a revolution that will sweep Aljunied and Bishan-Toa Payoh GRCs, practicality ultimately trumps idealism.

Low’s cult following will ensure that Yaw Shin Leong will retain Hougang. Chiam’s legend might just be enough to allow Lina to retain Potong Pasir. But they have built this support by walking the ground and serving the residents day-in day-out. They did not need a financial crisis or a Mas Selamat escape.

So ultimately, the question is whether their political cache is portable. We shall have to wait and see.

Government Lapses - Have you read the IM?

The word “lapse” – made almost fashionable since the escape of Mas Selamat Kastari (MSK) – has become heavy weighted with the tinge of bureaucratic incompetence. In the wake of the Committee of Inquiry findings on the lapses that led to MSK’s escape, I forwarded the notion that the ISD, like all its government agency buddies, suffered from a crippling bureaucratic culture that in their case led to inaction as a result of disempowerment and job scope compartmentalization.

In the Third Report of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) which was presented to Parliament on 23 June 2009, further lapses were found in several stat boards; ranging from tender-issuing irregularities to what is basically wasteful management of public resources.

Oversights and errors in judgment are part and parcel of any entity, be it public or private. Therefore I hope the affected Ministries and Stat Boards would accept these public airing of their shortcomings as a useful exercise in humility and accountability. Reasonable people would find no joy in reveling in their failures as ultimately as citizens, their failures more often then not have real consequences for the public at large.

I wont go into details of the latest lapses as they are readily available here. However I would like to highlight certain portions of the report that I feel encapsulate the cultural issues that plague our public servants.

In explaining the case of MINDEF in which a sub-contractor that was used had been barred from public-sector projects because of corruption, the Permanent Secretary of MINDEF “explained that its procurement agent, the Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA), did not check the debarment status of subcontractors as this was not required under the Government Instruction Manuals (IMs). Nevertheless, DSTA would amend its vetting procedures accordingly should the IMs be amended.”

For a sensitive institution that falls under the purview of MINDEF, a reasonable expectation would be proper screenings of the external parties the Stat Board deals with. Even in the absence of this due diligence, explaining it away with the lack of requirements listed in an Instruction Manual is indicative of functional impotence and more importantly, the frictions between those that set rules and those that have to follow them. Accountability should not be understood as enacting a series of rules that trap individuals into a mindset of “just follow law” as ignorance of an IM’s existence is seen as an unjustifiable excuse. Accountability is a process and not an IM. The existence of an IM doesn’t ensure good practice; it only ensures there is clarity when meting out punishment.

This is illustrated in the other ‘lapse’ covered in the report. I use air quotes as I personally do not think it is a lapse due to negligence or corruption. The report states that the National Heritage Board (NHB) had given an additional contract of $26 million for the construction of exhibition galleries at the National Museum to a designing company without calling for an additional tender; the company had previously won the tender two years ago at a lower quote. The board explained that it had given this designing company the additional contract work to avoid an 8 months delay to the reopening of the Museum. It also explained that the designer's price for the additional works was within the board's initial budget and very few contractors could do such specialized and complex construction.

Tendering processes have a good purpose. They are implemented to ensure competitive government procurement of services with the prime objectives of ensuring competitive prices and access parity to government projects. However, to fault the NHB for not re-initiating a tender process for additional work when the incumbent contract firm is already in place – and is still in the process of fulfilling its contract that it attained in a prior tender process mind you – is downright wasteful and inefficient. Alas, it is to fulfill some government IM crafted by individuals who probably never have to comply with such processes themselves.

So before you decide on the next blog to visit - have you read the IM?

THE MSK PLAY - Act IV will be a doozy

When news broke of Mas Selamat Kastari’s (MSK) escape back in February 2008, I, and I thrust many others, was left in utter disbelief. This dramatic Richard Kimble-nesque event set the scene for Act I of a play which threatened to have no conceivable end.

With the main character established, Act II brought the first turning point in this saga as an outraged populace grabbed pitch forks and sought answers, and hopefully some closure. The appointed Committee of Inquiry (COI), produced stunning evidences of operational breakdowns at the Whitely Road Detention Centre, and the term “complacency” began circulating in our minds and in public discourse.

In any good play, Act III would provide a second turning point where the pace quickens and the drama intensifies. Act Three is now upon us as it was announced this morning that MSK was captured in Malaysia following a joint-operation involving the internal agencies of the two countries. While many more questions can now be answered, the first natural response by the Government and the ISD, and all of us as well, would be to release a collective sigh of relief.

From a play that threatened to suspend itself at Act II, this Act III is indeed welcomed. However, the pitch forks are always at an arms length away and I suspect the Final Act (IV) will be perhaps the most captivating.

The Audacity of Change: Thoughts on Reclaiming Hougang (oops...the Singapore Dream)

The title of this entry is clumsy play on Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream”.

A wave of new found optimism is gathering strength in the United States as Barack Obama’s campaign steamrolls along. Emblematic of this movement are energized youths, engaged and interested in reclaiming a piece of the American dream - not their forefather’s dream, but rather a dream of their own.

With a faltering domestic economy, a political system governed by big business and special interest groups, and a draining foreign policy driven by a military culture, it would be by no stretch of the imagination to say that Americans have been frustrated and cynical of the status quo. Yes, they want change.

What strikes me as particularly interesting in this political movement is that there is an ongoing sideline struggle between what essentially are two factions in the ‘change camp’.

The frequent contentious public statements and retractions on Obama by cantankerous characters such as Obama’s spiritual mentor Rev. Wright, and more recently by civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson, represent a section of African-Americans voters who hanker for Obama to openly embrace his black heritage and not try to be something for everybody. In fact, critics doubt the eloquent statesman can win over the African-American community as successfully as he has done with the white community.

On the other side of the ‘change camp’ are the new guard of civil activists who buy into Obama’s post-racial ethos that transcends race and class differences.

These frictions between the old and new guards of the black civil rights movement got me thinking about the political scene here in Singapore. And with our nation’s 43rd birthday approaching in a matter of days, what better time to reflect on where we are as a nation and where we want to be.

A few days back, an old guard of the ruling party used a National Day event as a pretext to deliver a clear message that the fight for opposition-held wards was not over and that members of the grassroots should act as opposition for the opposition. In reaction, Choo Zheng Xi, editor-in-chief of The Online Citizen, astutely highlighted in a recent article that “Singapore is larger than the People’s Action Party (PAP) and its supporters”.

Surviving old guards of the PAP struggle with the baggage of early nation building and a siege mentality that was necessary at the time. They also struggle with the inevitable prospect of handing over custodial responsibilities to a new generation of leaders ‘polluted’ with liberal ideas from the west.

We see this struggle of ideals in opposition parties as well. Take for example the mini exodus from the Workers’ Party after the 2006 general elections. Young members seeking, more aggressive approaches to oppositional politics, grew disillusioned with the WP’s ‘safe’ politics.

I would like to think that until we find leaders, PAP or otherwise, that are ready to rise above partisan lines and embrace post-political politics, we will not see a sweeping movement for change in Singapore any time soon. When the right leader emerges, the ground will be ready to reclaim their Singapore Dream.