Have we seen any capable ministers like Dr. Goh Keng Swee in 1970s who was able to restructure the economy to address major threats and challenges.
Year after year since 1970s, we only hear our ministers during deep recessions talking about the same problems with the economy they could not solve or have failed to solve.
In earlier recessions, we already heard them talking about need for workers to upgrade their skills and many agencies were set up supposedly to upgrade the workers. What have these various agencies done and have they succeeded or are doing the right things in the right direction?
Our leaders have only talked about in recent years only old assumptions and presumptions about talents and ministers' worth and giving excuses with look-good presentations of some more measures and justifications, will they solve problems?
Have the ministers come up with a strategic economic master plan which will be fine-tuned with committed work processes and responsibilities at every department to make it work. (This call for effective strategy and implementation processes has been made for years to the FBU)
Yet the ministers keep talking about their talents and abilities in every election despite such failures of past promised economic restructuring. The domestic sector of the economy was the worse hit during all the past recessions. With all the pro-foreign investment incentives and job opportunities being open up to foreigners without any form of priority to its own citizens, have MOM Ng really worked for the people of Singapore?
If our million-dollar ministers are capable as presented in election, then they should understand why the old problems as identified in every recession committees did not work. Is it the domestic sector is suffering from high cost of doing business and this problem was not admitted in the past to cover up failures.
The new MPs and ministers should not keep repeating the same old solutions or pushing away problems. They should not keep quiet about old assumptions which did not work. They should make the leaders understand certain shortcomings in their mindset and go about addressing big mistakes in policies?
Somewhere and somehow the leaders after receiving their million-dollar increments in salaries and bonuses have gone soft and complacent although they gave the impression that they have many more policies coming all the time. This state of complacency can be seen in their constant self-praises and auto-piloting of assumptions in policies which did not work.
We can see that how this state of complacency have affected many ministers in past cases of major policy errors and negligence.
Often only the lower rung officers were made scapegoats who might have no control or power to implement certain measures:-
Just take a look at how the ministers have answered to some of the recent major policy errors and mistakes in implementation:
(1) Failures to deliver solemn promises made over the years in various committees and inquiries due to public outcries and big-scale retrenchments etc.
(2) Failures to restructure the economy to value-adding technology-driven strategy to address structural unemployments and losses of business competitiveness due to wrong policies creating high costs of doing business.
(3) Failures to change the highly academic elitist education system to broad-based practical knowledge application as posted to FBU since 2002.
(4) Serious multi-million Pocketing of monies by various GLC and other public employees e.g. overtime claims of pilots and cabin crew by SIA employee amounting to Millions
(5) Serious Corruption cases not deliberated in public to solve underlying problems of accountability and transparency e.g. project manager in Choice Home projects
(6) Million-dollar losses involving taxpayers' monies e.g. Temasek in various ventures overseas, million-dollar losses by Mediacorp/mediawork in 2002-2004, HDB's. PSA's and SIA's multi-million losses due to failure to implement accountable and transparent work processes to address costs.
(7) Hotel New World and Nicol Highway collapses due to negligence on the part of BCD in ensuring proper certification of structural submissions before issuing permit to commence work.
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SP's computerization mess resulting in stoppage of billing for months.
We were told by MM Lee in parliament that ministers were worth million-dollar salaries as that will attract able and capable people from the private sector CEOs and captains of industries to join politics but are they capable given this kind of major problems. In the private sector such mistakes would immediately result in resignations of CEOs but in the above-mentioned cases of bigger mistakes at national level, no one is taking responsibility to stop the policy errors or correct past wrong doings.
We want to have accountability and transparency in managing of the country. Where there is a lack of committed work processes where the decisions are ad hoc, and conceptual likely to cause future repetitions of mistakes and problems, the leaders must be made answerable.
Now and for many years, the leaders will continue to avoid answering to past major errors as posted in the "20 major policy errors of government".
To rub salt into the wound, ministers in the face of such errors are still being paid super bonuses without objective performance assessments by some independent panels. Will the same minister talents in private sector get such bonuses when they make this kind of major mistakes as posted in the foregoing?
The system runs like this:
(1) Elecction - making all sorts of promises to reach Swiss standard of living, creating jobs, claims to have talents to restructure the economy to up-adding technology-driven economic strategy, etc
(2) Ministers - making policies of all kinds but were unable to oversee or implement them except by making claims of all kinds of talents and abilities.
(3) Failures to achieve results for 1997 - 2002 - explained everything away by blaming on people's lack of training and skills (SPRING/WDA/EDB were supposed to have started training schemes for past twenty years and what happened)
(4) Defending every errors by making sweeping replies which did not address underlying problems e.g. Hotel New Wrold safety problems persisted in Nicol Highway collapse and many other similar accidents.
