A week ago there was a report on state media of some elderly men “chowing down” on leftovers at People’s Park Centre. It is hard to fathom how some people in Singapore could be so desperate that they would go around and eat the discarded food off people’s plates. As we are well aware, the PAP and its media, subsidised with your money, continually lecture Singaporeans on how fortunate they are to live in one of the world’s richest countries and how Singapore leads the world in health, housing and education.

In the AsiaOne report it said a Shin Min reporter questioned one of the uncles. The latter said that he had money to buy food and was going home to his children in the evening but simply “didn’t want the food to go to waste.” Of course his pride was unlikely to make him admit that he needed to eat half-digested scraps off other people’s plates but this won’t stop state media and Government Ministers from claiming that these unfortunates are doing it for fun or to sample a wide variety of cuisines. The disgraced former Speaker, Tan Chuan Jin said something equally insensitive and Marie Antoinette-like back in 2017, when he was Minister of Social and Family Development, that some of the elderly cardboard collectors were doing it for the exercise or as a fun activity to bring in some extra pocket money. TCJ was later caught on an open mic in April 2023 calling Jamus Lim a f*cking populist for wanting to spend more money on the poor. Using the word “chowing down” is also a deliberate choice on the part of state media, meant to suggest that this is in some way a bit of fun and light hearted recreational activity in which the men were participating enthusiastically rather than being driven by poverty and hunger to ignore the considerable risks of disease.

There was a similar report of elderly men eating leftover food at People’s Park from November 2022. I suspect that the phenomenon is much more widespread than the reports indicate. Perhaps the next stage will be for enterprising entrepreneurs to turn this into a profitable large scale business like in the Philippines, where discarded or rotten meat and vegetables from restaurants is refried and sold to the poor. It even has a Tagalog name, “pagpag”. Then the PAP can truly claim to have reversed the frequently used and false claim, “From Third World to First.”

It’s shameful that in such a rich country some Singaporeans are driven by hunger to do this. After all the PAP Government controls likely in excess of $3 trillion in reserves. It’s also true that the real cash surplus and not the fake one in the Budget, of the Government on its own without including our sovereign wealth funds and other state companies, runs into tens of billion of dollars a year. But it’s entirely consistent with the PAP’s economic model which involves imposing an intolerably high level of forced saving that has driven down domestic consumption to 31% of GDP and created a current account surplus of 37% of GDP. This facilitates the accumulation of reserves but is done without concern for the human cost. In the eyes of the PAP, the elderly who have failed to accumulate enough savings during their working lives are not worthy of help since it’s too late for them to be turned into productive tools to increase surplus extraction. Instead they are just seen as a burden on the state that no amount of SkillsFuture credits will turn into productive citizens.

Again the plight of these men is a stark reminder that no matter how much LHL waxed eloquent about how keen he was to bring the world’s billionaires to Singapore by creating a low or no tax haven, with an easy route to PR and ultimately citizenship, and the benefits this would bring to Singapore, the main beneficiaries have been those with real assets, like Shanmugam, LHL and many of their current and former Ministerial colleagues. Influenced perhaps by worries that too strict a regime will discourage investment, a seeming inability to prevent foreign criminals from using Singapore as a laundry until the very recent crackdowns has undoubtedly also played a part in driving up prices. Shanmugam and other PAP colleagues as well as many wealthy Singaporeans were fortunate enough to buy or already own GCBs and other landed property before this shift in policy brought about this influx and drove up prices of scarce assets, though it goes without saying that there was nothing illegal about this. Their returns have been spectacular and they could look forward to a retirement hobnobbing with the 0.1% and filled with enriching experiences. For ordinary Singaporeans and in particular for these elderly unfortunates, the inflation in costs that this influx has been partially responsible for has just made life harder. When will Singaporeans realise they have been had?

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