The YoungPaP has held its 17th Youth leadership training course on 2.8.2007 as posted on its website.
The Youngpap must have witnessed no doubt the various problems confronting the country of late from NKF malpractices to government ministries' incurring financial losses in many projects due to negligence and carelessness as reported by Auditor General and recently to Shin Corp losses etc.
Are the Youngpap's Youth Leadership training course aimed at providing solutions to problems facing the country citizens ?
If not then the citizens will be left wondering what is the purpose of such training if they are not producing the desired results to turn things around.
What is leadership, talents, insight, foresight ? Are leadership, foresight or talents some form of self-centredness or assumptions?
Are all the policies constantly uttered by the leaders too conceptual and unattainable being based on too much look-good assumptions.
Are policies like meritocracy, leadership, pragmatism, anti-welfare taxing and back-charging of all costs to citizens producing the intended results or are people being made to suffer from policies which are no longer working but only causing rising costs of living and loss of economic competitiveness.
Are we building a country where the people are being over-taxed causing our very own domestic economy losing competitiveness for years.
Are we still building a country based on the philosophy of bringing about the greatest benefits of the greatest number?
Should we continue to allow this type of talk-only conceptual leadership while ignoring and passing over genuine problems as unsolvable or just to allow such conceptual leaders to get by?
Are our leaders still as committed as before to sacrifice for the people by working towards bringing about the greatest benefits of the greatest number instead of his own benefits?
Are our leaders interested in building up a system of government which could be participated by the citizens based on accountability, balanced roles, checks and balances, codes of conduct, using objective pre-defined independent assessments.
Are our government leaders working on feedbacks of the people to solve the rising costs of living which are already setting back our competitiveness.
Should such leaders keep the political power to themselves given the above-stated problems and issues and still be excused from all the suffering and wrongs.
Despite many years of rhetorics, and lately from ministers' utterances of nonsense in refusing to grant permit for holding cycling event by WP while allowing youngpap to hold such similar event, it has become increasingly clear that the government has degenerated into one of legalistic wrangling of laws and regulations to maintain political control, taxing and recovering costs and even profiteering depriving people of essential services like medicare, utilities, education, housing, transportation etc.
As a result of such a system of autocratic government, the country has taken a setback since the 1970s with its own domestic economy stagnating, dropping wages, young and educated unemployments.
The domestic economy is being squeezed out of their survival by government's getting into businesses of all sorts to compete with its own citizens.
What happen to all the talents of our own citizens or do we have no talents?
In the fast-paced technology, we need to build collective or distributive leadership whereby all policies and decisions of government are not resting on the desires or self-centredness of a few leaders but are distributed or decentralised through pre-planned work processes to be performed by the whole government team.
Only when a leadership system is so translated into down-to-earth implementation processes with accountability and check and balances will it lead to broad-based participation and knowledge application by the all with the support of the masses.
Therefore considering the above-stated circumstances facing the country as a whole our leaders today should be in possession of not only directional visions or foresight but more importantly they should possess the quality to make good accountable decisions and have the implementation ability to translate all policies and decisions to broad-based knowledge applications and teamwork.
We will need to leaders who were able to empathise with people's problems and suffering as expressed in feedbacks such as the "20 major major government policy errors" given to the Feedback Unit since 2002.
We need ministers and civil servants who could come down from their ivory tower and be able to solve many problems we are facing and to restructure the economy to value-adding technology-driven economy talked about for years.
Perhaps youngpap members who have attended such training courses should share with all whether they have indeed received the kind of leadership training to help solve problems or only to qualify them to gain their own internal promotion.