Singaporeans’ excitement over the Presidential election is more a reflection of their frustration with the PAP’s carefully gerrymandered Parliamentary elections which disenfranchise 40% of Singaporeans who vote for the Opposition by giving them less than 10% of the seats. A significant percentage of Singaporeans also vote for the PAP out of fear, partly because of past PAP threats to punish voters through loss of public spending if they elect Opposition MPs in their area and partly because they have been gaslighted into believing that an Opposition government will bankrupt the country and that their living standards will drop drastically.

Singaporeans feel freer to vote for candidates in the Presidential Election. Though the idea that their choice of President is going to change anything is an illusion. That is when there is a choice since the PAP have historically carefully excluded anyone they feel is a threat to the Government or even who might ask uncomfortable questions and even demand answers.

In the first PE, they excluded my father on the grounds that he had a criminal conviction even though his conviction had been more than five years ago and, more importantly, was overturned by the Privy Council, a judgement that the Government, aided by one K. Shanmugam, refused to recognise. Obviously the Presidential Election Committee is flexible in its interpretation of criminal conviction because this year they have waved Tharman through despite him having a criminal conviction that no judicial body, let alone Singapore’s highest court, has said should be set aside.

Singaporeans get Ong Teng Cheong instead, who despite being a former PAP Minister is still lauded as the only independent President we have and yet he was unable to get the Government to answer basic questions about the size of the reserves. He was famously fobbed off with the excuse that giving him a list of Government assets would cost more than 56 man years. If only two civil servants were working on it we could have got to the answer by now.

Since then PM Lee has only tightened the criteria supposed to prevent a future shock by raising the amount of assets required for a candidate from the private sector to $500 million from $100 million. In the case of the last Presidential election, a new wrinkle was added by deciding with little advance notice to reserve the election for a Malay candidate in a move widely seen as thought up just to prevent Tan Cheng Bock (TCB) from standing again and probably winning. It didn’t help that the Malay candidate was an Indian Muslim not considered to be Malay at all by most people.

This time we have three candidates. I find them all relatively unpalatable but Tharman and Ng Kok Song more so than Tan Kin Lian. Tharman of course cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as independent. He was Finance Minister for several years and remained until his resignation a few weeks ago Chairman of MAS and Deputy Chairman of GIC. The Presidential forum on Monday, where he said “building a fairer and more inclusive society has been his ‘whole life purpose’ since he was a student activist through his time in public service”, according to CNA was just humbug. It seems to me that Tharman’s whole life purpose has been in climbing the PAP ladder.

I have repeatedly drawn attention in my blog to the tricks he has used in the Budget to falsely inflate Government spending and hide resources from Singaporeans. While he was Finance Minister the General Government cash surplus was regularly over $20 billion while the Budget balance showed small surpluses or deficits. The real surplus was of course much greater because this didn’t include the surpluses of Temasek, GIC and MAS, only capital receipts and land sales revenues. He might say that the Constitutional framework didn’t allow the Government to spend money that accrued to Past Reserves only through the Net Investment Returns. However during his tenure, in Budget 2014 he allocated $9 billion to the Pioneer Generation Package, to take just one example. As of 31 March 2022 approximately $6.2 billion remained. Annual spending was only a small fraction of the total amount allocated.

There is also the recent issue raised with the employment of his adult son Akilan Shanmuguratnam in the Ministry of Finance (MOF). According to MOF and the Public Service Division (PSD) Akilan was transferred to the Education and Social Policies Division from the Reserves Division in July to avoid any conflict of interest. It’s remarkable how the children of PAP Ministers always seem to bag scholarships and rapid advancement in Government service or state companies. Scholarships should be set aside for talented students on low to medium incomes rather than the children of Government Ministers which only serves to perpetuate a hereditary oligarchy. Also moving Akilan to another role still doesn’t remove the conflict of interest since his promotion within MOF could still conflict with the need for the President to be independent and a way in which he could be influenced. The rapidity with which MOF and PSD came to Tharman’s defence is alarming but not so much as Tharman’s attempts at misdirection. No, Tharman! Your daughter, mother, sister and female relatives etc aren’t relevant unless they do National Service, are in receipt of government scholars and are also employed in MOF.

Ng Kok Song claims he is independent but since he worked at MAS and GIC for his entire career he can hardly be considered so. His son-in-law is an MD at GIC. The fact he turned me down for a position at MAS in 1983 even though my academic qualifications were far superior to Tharman and the rest of the cohort of Singapore scholars at that time shows he will do whatever he thinks his superiors want him to do. It was clearly a political decision. He says he will divest his stake in his hedge fund when he becomes President but it has already benefited from huge seed investments by Singapore Labour Foundation (part of NTUC and therefore joined at the hip to the PAP), Temasek and GIC. Is he capable of being Independent? To any neutral observer not very likely.

Tan Kin Lian, I know personally as a friendly and helpful man but he is an unattractive candidate given his misogynistic posts on social media, for which he made a very qualified apology. He’s also made racist posts in the past and expressed support for Putin and Xi. However he is definitely the most independent of the candidates despite having previously been a PAP member for 30 years. When I’ve met him he’s always seemed a nice guy. He still seems the candidate most likely to raise questions or force the Government to reveal more information about the reserves. He has also stated that he would not be reluctant to call a COI when needed.

All the talk about the President’s role in holding the second key is itself a distraction. The President doesn’t hold any key since he appoints only 3 out of the 8 Presidential Advisers and if he goes against them his decisions can be rapidly overturned by a two-thirds vote of Parliament. This is easily achievable when the PAP hold more than 90% of the seats. The only way for the President’s blocking power to be effective is if PAP are denied a two-thirds majority at the next election.I’d rather we focus on that.

More importantly all the talk about the President being there to stop the reserves being squandered by a profligate government is a distraction. There’s no chance of that happening. The problem with the way our money is managed is that the Government spends too little not too much and as a result the economy is stagnating, unemployment is rising and Singaporeans are denied a standard of living that the country can easily afford. I have long advocated that we should be spending 3-4% of the financial reserves annually, or $90 billion if the reserves are, as I suspect, in excess of $3 trillion. Instead we have the farce of the NIRC, most of which is offset by transfers to long term funds rather than current spending. Given that the state owns 90% of the land the value of the total reserves is easily in excess of $10 trillion. It would be better to do away with the President and have democratic reforms. However if we do have the EP, they should have powers to stop the Government underspending as well as overspending.

Faced with unattractive choices, spoiling your vote may appear superficially tempting. However I feel that would be a mistake and quite difficult not to have a spoiled vote counted as bing for a PAP candidate. Historically spoiling votes, walking out of Parliament and calling for a boycott of elections gave the PAP the absolute control it enjoys today. The PAP (and their preferred candidate) don’t give a fig for your opinion. All they’re interested in is power. Even if 98% of the electorate spoil their votes they will be happy to claim victory, to ignore the fact that they don’t have a mandate and use the coercive power of the state to enforce their rule. All spoiling your vote will do is to elect the PAP candidate. So make sure you vote wisely on Friday and vote for the candidate who is likely to be most independent from the Government.

Published by kjeyaretnam

I'm a Singaporean economist who became an opposition activist. I blog to provide an alternative to the porkies that the Pinkies tell. It just so happens that my alternative is the truth. That's why I've never been sued in any civil or criminal court no matter how hard hitting my criticism. I'm quoted and interviewed and asked to speak across the world but largely censored in Singapore in an effort to silence my political opinions. The left hate me because they think I split their vote and because I eschew their outmoded economic models. Models that don't work. The Right and the Conservatives hate me because I'm a liberal. I'm not sure what the middle think of me. I don't think there are more than a handful of people in the middle, here in Singapore. I'm a Singaporean born and bred, dual heritage, my parents Singaporean established here before the State of Singapore was created. I'm not Eurasian. I read economics at Cambridge and could be broadly described as from the Keynesian school but I believe in interventions. I was formerly a successful hedge fund manager. After economics and politics my greatest interests are history, film and Makan. I run but I run so I can eat like a Singaporean. View all posts by kjeyaretnam