Two recent reports about Singapore

Two interesting reports, each about a key aspect of Singapore, have recently come out in the news.

The more recent one, published earlier this month, is the Auditor-General’s report to Parliament and the President. Highlighted in the media, the report casts a critical eye over the various practices and procedures in the various public-service institutions, and identifies many places where it is found wanting, such as in procurement – while incidents such as the NParks Brompton bike incident have grabbed the headlines, this report reminds us that managing the proper use of public funds is often about the nitty-gritty details, many of which boil down to administration and paperwork rather than the more obvious issues of integrity or outright corruption. Indeed, even the Singaporean public service, generally well-regarded in terms of efficiency and freedom from corruption, is shown to be susceptible to mismanagement in many areas, and to a surprisingly large degree in particular areas.

This is perhaps particularly pertinent in light of the various high-profile cases in recent years involving top civil-service personnel, and further exacerbated by the two cases just this month – the Kovan double murder where the primary suspect is a police officer, and the most recent case of the CPIB officer charged with fraud. This last case, of a top anti-corruption officer under investigation for corruption, is especially ironic and worrying, as highlighted in this article:

CPIB officer charged: Another public servant bites the dust?

by Bertha Henson

What on earth is happening to our public servants?

You have the head of civil defence jailed in a case of sex for contracts, a former prosecutor behind bars for sex with an underaged girl, a prison’s deputy superintendent fined for neglecting to supervise the take down of an inmate which caused his death, a police officer arrested for double murders and now a CPIB officer charged for fraud involving $1.7m of public funds?

The irony of it all: The watcher needs watching!

——————————————————————————————

The second report, Suara Musyawarah, is a civil-society attempt to engage with and bring out the views of the Malay community in Singapore through various conversations and dialogue sessions. The issue of racial identity and relations has always been a sensitive one in Singapore, but this has unfortunately also often meant a reluctance to examine related problems, as well as a tendency to treat the issue in a simplistic manner. This report (which you can download from their site), with its emphasis on conversation and consultation, brings an interesting perspective on the Malay community that is much less reliant on the usual top-down approach.

On top of this, another report, done by OnePeople.sg and the Institute of Policy Studies, has also been published. Looking at racial issues more specifically in terms of defined criteria, it found a distinctly mixed picture:

 

It has long been argued that an official policy of tolerance tends to discourage real integration and thus mask deeper problems of race, and these two reports go some way to highlight this general problem.